Conservative Government 1895-1905

A coalition of the Conservative and Liberal Unionist parties took power in the United Kingdom following the general election of 1895. The Conservative leader, Lord Salisbury, took office as prime minister, and his nephew, Arthur Balfour, was leader of the Commons, but various major posts went to the Liberal Unionist leaders, most notably the Liberal Unionist leader in the Lords, the Duke of Devonshire, who was made Lord President, and his colleague in the Commons, Joseph Chamberlain, who became Colonial Secretary. It was this government which would conduct the Boer War from 1899 to 1902, which was exploited by the government to help win a landslide victory in the general election of 1900.

Balfour succeeded Salisbury as prime minister in 1902, and the government would eventually falter after Chamberlain proposed his scheme for tariff reform, whose partial embrace by Balfour led to the resignation of the more orthodox free traders in the Cabinet.

After the conclusion of the Boer War the British government sought to rebuild South Africa's economy which had been devastated by the war. An important part of the rebuilding effort was to get the gold mines of the Witwatersrand, the richest in history and a major cause of the war, back in production as soon as possible. Because the government decreed that white labour was too expensive and black labourers were reluctant to return to the mines, the Union government decided to import 63,000 contracted workers from China.

This was deeply unpopular at the time as popular opinion in much of the western world, including Britain, was hostile to Chinese immigration. It also happened at a time when poverty and unemployment amongst lower class British workers was very high. On 26 March 1904 a demonstration against Chinese immigration to South Africa was held in Hyde Park and was attended by 80,000 people. The Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress then passed a resolution declaring that:

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