So far scarcely a cloud appears on the horizon of Canada's national destiny. Like a ship launched roughly from her stays to tempests in shallow water, she seems to have left tempests and shallow water behind and to have sailed proudly out to the great deeps. In '37 she settled whether she would be ruled by special interests, by a plutocracy, by an oligarchy. In '67 she settled forever what in the United States would be called "states' rights." That is—she gathered the scattered members of her fold into one confederation and bound them together not only with the constitution of the British North America Act, but with bands of iron and steel in railways that linked Nova Scotia with British Columbia. By '77 she had met the menace of the American high tariff, which barred her from markets, and entered on a fiscal system of her own. By '87 her system of transportation east and west was in working order and she had begun the subsidizing of steamships and the search for world markets which have since resulted in a total foreign trade equal to one-fourth that of the United States. By '97 she was almost ready for the preferential tariff reduction of from twenty-five to thirty-three per cent. on British goods which the Laurier government later introduced, and she had established her right to negotiate commercial treaties with foreign powers independent of the Mother Country. By 1907 she was in the very maelstrom of the maddest real estate boom and immigration flood tide that a sane country could weather.
In a word, Canada's greatest dangers and difficulties seem to have been passed. The sea seems calm and the sky fair. In reality, she is close to the greatest dangers that can threaten a nation—dangers within, not without; dangers, not physical, but psychological, which are harder to overcome; dangers of dilution and contamination of national blood, national grit, national government, national ideals.
These are strong statements! Let us see if facts substantiate them!
Canada's natural increase of population is only one-fourth her incoming tide of colonists. In a word, put her natural increase at eighty to one hundred thousand a year, and it is nearer eighty than one hundred thousand. Her immigration exceeds four hundred thousand. If that immigration were all British and all American there would be no problem; for though there are differences in government, both people have the same national ideal—utter freedom of opportunity for each man to work out the best in him. It is an even wager that the average Canadian coming to the United States is unaware of any difference in his freedom, and the average American coming to Canada is unaware of any difference in his freedom. Both people have fought and bled for freedom and treasure it as the most sacred thing in life.
But this is not so of thirty-three per cent. of Canada's immigrants who do not speak English, much less understand the institutions of freedom to which they have come. If they had been worthy of freedom, or capable of making right use of it, they would have fought for it in the land from which they came, or died fighting for it—as Scotchmen and Irishmen and Englishmen and Americans have fought and bled for freedom wherever they have lived. A people unused to freedom suddenly plunged in freedom need not surprise us if they run amuck.
"This is mos' won'erful country," writes Tony to his brother in Italy."They let us vote and they pay us two dollars to do it."
"Yah, yah," answered a foreign mother in North Winnipeg to a school-teacher, trying to recall why her young hopeful had played truant. "Dat vas eelection—my boy, he not go—because Jacob—my man—he vote seven time and make seven dollar." (The whole family had been on a glorious seven-dollar drunk.)
"Does this man understand for what he is voting?" demanded the election clerk of a Galician interpreter who had brought in a naturalized foreigner to vote.
"Oh, yaas; I eexplain heem."
"Can he write?"
An indeterminate nod of the head; so the voter marks his ballot, and his vote counts for as much as that of the premier or president of a railroad.
For years Canadians have pointed the finger of scorn at the notorious misgovernment of American cities, at the manner in which foreigners were herded to the polls by party bosses to vote as they were paid. The cases of a Louisiana judge impeached for issuing bogus certificates of citizenship to four hundred aliens and of New York courts that have naturalized ignorant foreigners in batches of twenty-five thousand in a few months have all pointed a moral or adorned a tale in Canada.
Yet what is happening in Canada since the coming of hordes of ignorant immigrants? I quote what I have stated elsewhere, an episode typical of similar episodes, wherever the foreign vote herds in colonies. An election was coming on in one of the western provinces, where reside twenty thousand foreigners almost en bloc. The contest was going to be very close. Offices were opened in a certain block. Legally it requires three years to transform a foreigner into a voting Canadian subject. He must have resided in Canada three years before he can take out his papers. The process is simple to a fault. The newcomer goes before a county judge with proof of residence and two Canadian witnesses. He must not be a criminal, and he must be of age. That is all that is required to change a Pole or a Sicilian or a Slav into a free and independent Canadian fully competent to apprehend that voting implies duties and fitness as well as rights. The contest was going to be very close. A few of the party leaders could not bear to have those newcomers wait a long three years for naturalization. They got together and they forged in the same hand, the same manipulation, the signatures of three hundred foreigners, who did not know in the least what they were doing, to applications for naturalization papers—foreigners who had not been three months in Canada. If forgery did not matter, why should perjury? The perpetrators of this fraud happened to be provincial and of a stripe different politically from the federal government then in power at Ottawa. The other party had not been asleep while this little game was going on. The party heeler neither slumbers nor sleeps. The papers with those three hundred forged signatures—names in the writing of foreigners, who could neither read, write, nor speak a word of English—were sent down to the Department of Justice in Ottawa; and everybody waited for the explosion. The explosion did not come. Those perjuries and forgeries slumber yet, secure in the Department of Justice. For when the provincial politicians heard what had been done to trap them, they sent down a little message to the heelers of the party in power: If you go after us forthis, we'll go after you forthat; and perhaps the pot had better not call the kettle black. The chiefs of each party were powerless to act because the heelers of both parties had been alike guilty.
It may be said that the fault here was not in the poor ignorant foreigner but in the corrupt Canadian politicians. That is true of Canada, as it is of similar practices in the United States; but the presence of the ignorant, irresponsible foreigner in hordes made the corruption possible, where it is neither possible nor safe with men of Saxon blood, with German, Scandinavian or Danish immigrants, for instance.
It is futile to talk of the poor and ignorant foreigner as a Goth or a Vandal—to talk of excluding the ignorant and the lowly. The floating "he-camps"—as these floating immigrants are called in labor circles—are to-day doing much of the manual work of the world. Canadian railways could not be built without them. Canadian industrial and farm life could not go on without them. They are needed from Halifax to Vancouver, and their labor is one of the wealth producers for the nation.
And do not think for a moment that the wealth they produce is for capital—for the lords of finance and not for themselves. When Montenegrins, who earn thirty cents a day in their own land, earn eleven dollars a day on dynamite work constructing Canadian railroads, it is not surprising that they retire rich, and that the railroad for which they worked would have gone bankrupt if the Dominion had not come to its aid with a loan of millions. Likewise of Poles and Galicians in the coal mines. When Charles Gordon—Ralph Connor—was sent to investigate the strike in these mines he found foreigners earning seventeen dollars a day on piecework who had never earned fifty cents a day in their own land. I have in mind one Galician settler who has accumulated a fortune of $150,000 in perfectly legitimate ways in ten years. Even the Doukhobors—the eccentric Russian religious sect—hooted for their oddities of manner and frenzies of religion—are accumulating wealth in the Elbow of the Saskatchewan, where they are settled.
From the national point of view Canada needs these foreign settlers. She needs their labor. Every man to her is worth fifteen hundred dollars in productive work. The higher wages he earns on piecework the more Canada is pleased; for the more work he has done. But at the present rate of peopling Canada these foreign born will in twenty years outnumber the native born. What will become of Canada's national ideals then? In one foreign section of the Northwest I once traveled a hundred miles through new settlements without hearing one word of English spoken; and these Doukhobors and Galicians and Roumanians and Slavs were making good. They were prospering exceedingly. Men who had come with less than one hundred dollars each and lived for the first years in crowded tenements of Winnipeg or under thatch-roof huts on the prairie now had good frame houses, stables, stock, modern implements. The story is told of one poor Russian who, when informed of the fact that the land would be his very own, fell to the earth and kissed the soil and wept. Such settlers make good on soil, whatever ill they work in a polling booth. Except for his religious vagaries, the Doukhobor Russian is law abiding. The same can not be said of the other Slav immigrants. Crime in the Northwest, according to the report of the Mounted Police, has increased appallingly. The crimes are against life rather than against property—the crimes of a people formerly kept in order by the constant presence of a soldier's bayonet run amuck in Canada with too much freedom. And the votes of these people will in twenty years out-vote the Canadian. These poverty-stricken Jews and Polacks and Galicians will be the wealth and power of Canada to-morrow. If you doubt what will happen, stroll down Fifth Avenue, New York, and note the nationality of the names. A Chicago professor carefully noted the nationality of all the names submitted in Chicago's elections for a term of years. Three-quarters of the names were of nationalities only one generation away from the Ghetto.
Man to man on the prairie farm, in the lumber woods, your Canadian can out-do the Russian or Galician or Hebrew. The Canadian uses more brains and his aggregate returns are bigger; but boned down to a basis ofwhocan save the most and become rich fastest, your foreigner has the native-born Canadian beaten at the start. Where the Canadian earns ten dollars and spends eighty per cent. of it, your foreigner earns five dollars, and saves almost all of it. How does he do this? He spends next to nothing. Let me be perfectly specific on how he does it: I have known Russian, Hebrew, Italian families in the Northwest who sewed their children into their clothes for the winter and never permitted a change till spring. Your Canadian would buy half a dozen suits for his children in the interval. Your foreigner buys of furniture and furnishings and comforts practically nothing for the first few years. He sleeps on the floor, with straw for a bed, and he occupies houses twenty-four to a room—which is the actual report in foreign quarters in the north end of Winnipeg. Your Canadian requires a house of six rooms for a family of six. When your foreigner has accumulated a little capital he buys land or a city tenement. Your Canadian educates his children, clothes them a little better, moves into a better house. When the foreigner buys a block, he moves his whole family into one room in the basement and does the janitor and scrubbing and heating work himself or forces his women to do it for him. When the Canadian buys a block, he hires a janitor, an engineer, a scrub woman, and if he moves into the block, he takes one of the best apartments. It does not take any guessing to know which of these two will buy a second block first—especially if the foreigner lives on peanuts and beer, and the Canadian on beefsteak and fresh fruit. Nor does it take any guessing to know which type stands for the higher citizenship—which will make toward the better nation.
The question is—will Canada remain Canada when these new races come up to power? And Canada need not hoot that question; or gather her skirts self-righteously and exclusively about her and pass by on the other side. The United States did that, and to-day certain sections of the foreign vote are powerful enough to dictate to the President.
Take a little closer look at facts!
Foreigners have never been rushed into Canada as cheap labor to displace the native born, so they have not, as in great American industrial centers, lowered the standard of living for Canadians. They have come attracted by two magnets that give them great power: (1) wages so high they can save; (2) land absolutely free but for the ten-dollar preemption fee.
In 1881 there were six hundred and sixty-seven Jews in Canada.
In 1901 there were sixteen thousand. To-day it is estimated there are twenty thousand each in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg. These Jews have not gone out to the land. They have crowded into the industrial centers reproducing the housing evils from which they fled the European Ghetto. There are sections of Winnipeg and Montreal and Toronto where the very streets reek of Bowery smells. When they go to the woods or the land, these people have not the stamina to stand up to hard work. Yet in the cities, by hook or crook, by push-cart and trade, they acquire wealth. On the charity organization of the cities they impose terrible burdens during Canada's long cold winter.
In one section of the western prairie are 150,000 Galicians. Of Austrians and Germans—the Germans chiefly from Austria and Russia—there are 800,000 in Canada, or a population equal to the city of Montreal. Of Italians at last report there were fully 60,000 in Canada. In one era of seven years there took up permanent abode in Canada 121,000 Austrians, 50,000 Jews, 60,000 Italians, 60,000 Poles and Russians, 40,000 Scandinavians. When you consider that by actual count in the United States in 1900, 1,000 foreign-born immigrants had 612 children, compared to 1,000 Americans having 296 children, it is simply inconceivable but that this vast influx of alien life should not work tremendous and portentous changes in Canada's life, as a similar influx has completely changed the face of some American institutions in twenty years. Immigration to Canada has jumped from 54,000 in 1851-1861 to 142,000 in 1881-1891, and to 2,000,000 in 1901-1911. It has not come in feeble rivulets that lost their identity in the main current—as in the United States up to 1840. It has come to Canada in inundating floods.
Chief mention has been made of the races from the south of Europe because the races from the north of Europe assimilate so quickly that their identity is lost. Of Scandinavians there are in Canada some fifty thousand; of Icelanders, easily twenty thousand; and so quickly do they merge with Canadian life that you forget they are foreigners. I was a child in Winnipeg when the first Icelanders arrived, and their rise has been a national epic. I do not believe the first few hundreds had fifty dollars among them. They slept under high board sidewalks for the first nights and erected tar-paper shanties on vacant lots the next day. In these they housed the first winter. Though we Winnipeggers did not realize it, it must have been a dreadful winter to them. Their clothing was of the scantest. Many were without underwear. They lived ten and twenty to a house. The men sawed wood at a dollar and a half a day. The women worked out at one dollar a day. In a few weeks each family had bought a cow and rudiments of winter clothes. By spring they had money to go out on their homesteads. During winter some of the grown men attended school to learn English. Teachers declared they never witnessed such swift mastery of learning. To-day the Icelanders are the most prosperous settlers in Manitoba. The same story could be told of German Mennonites driven from Russia by religious persecution and of Scandinavians driven abroad by poverty. Of course, the weak went to the wall and died, and didn't whine about the dying, though some mother's heart must have broken in silence. I recall one splendid young fellow who walked through every grade the public schools afforded, and then through the high school, and was on the point of graduating in medicine when he died from sheer mental and physical exhaustion. This type of settler will build up Canada's national ideals. It is the other type that gives one pause.
Well—what is Canada going to do about it? Bar them out! Never! She needs these raw brawny Vandals and Goths of alien lands as much as they need Canada. She needs their hardy virility. They are the crude material of which she must manufacture a manhood that is not sissified, and one must never forget that some of the most honored names in the United States are from these very races. One of the greatest mathematicians in the United States, the greatest copper miners, the richest store keepers, one of the most powerful manufacturers—these sprang from the very races that give Canada pause to-day.
It is on the school rather than on the church that Canada must depend for the nationalizing of these alien races. Nearly all the colonists from the south of Europe have brought their church with them. In one foreign church of North Winnipeg is a congregation of four thousand, and certainly, in the case of the Doukhobors, the influence of the foreign priest has not been for the good of Canada. But none of these races has brought with them a school system, and that throws on the public school system of Canada the burden of preserving national ideals for the future. Will the schools prove equal to it? I wish I could answer unequivocally "yes"; for I recall some beautiful episodes of boys and girls—too immature to realize the importance of their work—"baching" it in prairie shanties, teaching at forty dollars a month; amid the isolation of Doukhobor and Galician and Ruthenian settlement preserving Canada's national ideals for the future; little classes of foreigners in the schools of North Winnipeg reading lessons in perfect English with flower gardens below the window kept by themselves—the little girls learning sewing and housekeeping in upper rooms, the boys learning technical trades in the basement. All this is good and well; but how about the recognition Canada gives these teachers who manufacture men and women out of mud, who do more in a day for the ideals of the nation than all the eloquence that has been spouted in Houses of Parliament? In Germany, they say—once an army man always an army man; for though the pay is ridiculously small, social prestige and recognition are so great that the army is the most desirable vocation. Canada's teachers in the schools among foreigners are doing for the Dominion what the German army has aimed to do for the empire. Do the Canadian teachers receive the same recognition? The question needs no answer. They receive so little recognition that the majority throw aside the work at their twenty-first year and crowd into other over-crowded professions. Meanwhile time moves on, and in twenty years the foreign vote will outnumber that of the native born.
If the coming of the foreigner has been Canada's greatest danger from within, the coming of the Oriental has been one of her most perplexing problems from without. It is not only a perplexity to herself. It is a perplexity in which Canada involves the empire.
Take the three great Oriental peoples! With China, Great Britain is in friendly agreement. With Japan, Great Britain is in closest international pact. To India, Great Britain is a Mother. Yet Canada refuses free admission to peoples from all three countries. Why? For the same reason as do South Africa and Australia. It is only secondarily a question of labor. The thing goes deeper than that.
Consider Japan first: Panama is turning every port facing west into a front door instead of a back door. Within twenty years, the combined populations of American ports on the Pacific have jumped from a few hundreds of thousands at San Francisco and nothing elsewhere to almost two million, with growth continuing at an accelerated rate promising within another quarter of a century as many great harbors of almost as great population on the Pacific as on the Atlantic. The Orient has suddenly awakened. It is importing something besides missionaries. It is buying American and Canadian steel, American and Canadian wool, American and Canadian wheat, American and Canadian machinery, American and Canadian dressed lumber. Ship owners on the Pacific report that the docks of through traffic are literally jammed with goods outward bound—"more goods than we have ships," as the president of one line testified.
When the reason for building Panama has been shorn of highfalutin metaphors, it concentrates down to the simple bald fact that the United States possessions on the Pacific had grown too valuable to be guarded by a navy ten thousand miles away around the Horn. True, Roosevelt sent the fleet around the world to show what it could do, and the country howled its jubilation over the fact. But the Little Brown Brother only smiled; for the fleet hadn't coal to steam five hundred miles without hiring foreign colliers to follow around with supply of fuel. "Fine fleet! To be sure we have the ships," exploded a rear admiral in San Diego Bay a few years ago; "but look here!" He pointed through the port at an insignificant coaling dock such as third-rate barges use. "See any coal?" he asked. "If trouble should come"—it was just after the flight of Diaz—"we haven't coal enough to go half-way up or down the coast."
Sometimes we can guess the game from the moves of the chess players.With facts for chessmen, what are the moves?
It was up in Atlin, British Columbia, a few years after the Klondike rush. Five hundred Japs had come tumbling into the mining camp, seemingly from nowhere, in reality from Japanese colonies in Hawaii. The white miners warned the Japs that "it wouldn't be a healthy camp," but mine owners were desperate for workers. Wages ran at from five to ten dollars a day. The Japs were located in a camp by themselves and put to work. On dynamite work, for which the white man was paid five to ten dollars, the Jap was paid three and five dollars. Still he held on with his teeth, "dogged as does it," as he always does. Suddenly the provincial board of health was notified. There was a lot of sickness in the Jap camp—"filthy conditions," the mine owners reported. The board of health found traces of arsenical poisoning in all the Jap maladies. The Japs decamped as if by magic.
Simultaneously there broke out from Alaska to Monterey the anti-Jap, anti-Chinese, anti-Hindu agitation. California's exclusion and land laws became party planks. British Columbia got round it by a subterfuge. She had the Ottawa government rush through an order-in-council known as "the direct passage" law. All Orientals at that time were coming in by way of Hawaii. Ships direct from India were not sailing. They stopped at Hong Kong and Hawaii. The order-in-council was to forbid the entrance of Brown Brothers unless in direct passage from their own land. That effectually barred the Hindu out, till recently when a Japanese line, to test the Direct Passage Act, brought a shipload of Hindus direct from India to Vancouver. Vancouverites patrolled docks and would not let them land. A head tax of five hundred dollars was leveled at John Chinaman. That didn't keep John Chinaman out. It simply raised his wages; for the Chinese boss added to the new hand's wages what was needed to pay the money loaned for entrance fee. A special arrangement was made with the Mikado's government to limit Japanese emigration to a few hundreds given passports, but California went the whole length of demanding the total exclusion of Brown Brothers.
Why? What was the Pacific Coast afraid of? When the State Departments of the United States and Canada met the State Department of the Mikado, practically what was said was this. Only in very diplomatic language:
Whiteman: "We don't object to your students and merchants and travelers, but what we do object to is the coolies. We are a population of a few hundred thousands in British Columbia, of less than three million in the states of the Pacific. What with Chink and Jap and Hindu, you are hundreds of millions of people. If we admit your coolies at the present rate (eleven thousand had tumbled into one city in a few months), we shall presently have a coolie population of millions. We don't like your coolies any better than you do yourself! Keep them at home!"
This conversation is paraphrased, but it is practically the substance of what the representative of the Ottawa government said to a representative of the Mikado.
Brown Brother: "We don't care any more for our coolies than you do. We don't in fact, care a hoot what becomes of the spawn and dregs of no-goods in our population. We are not individualists, as you white men are! We don't aim to keep the unfit cumbering the earth! We don't care a hoot for these coolies; but what we do care for is this—we Orientals refuse to be branded any longer as an inferior race. We'll restrain the emigration of these coolies by a passport system; but don't you forget it, just as soon as we are strong enough, in the friendliest, kindest, suavest, politest, most diplomatic way in the world, we intend not to be branded any longer as an inferior race. We intend to stand shoulder to shoulder with you in the management of the world's affairs. If we don't stand up to the job, throw us down! If we stand up to the job—and we stood up moderately in China and Russia and Belgium—we don't intend to ask you for the sop of that Christian brotherhood preached by white men. We intend to force recognition of what we are by what we do. We ask no favors, but we now serve you notice we are in to play the game."
Neither is this conversation a free translation. Shorn of diplomatic kotowing and compliments and circumlocutions, it is exactly what the Mikado's representative served to the representatives of three great governments—Uncle Sam's, John Bull's, Miss Canada's. If you ask how I know, I answer—direct from one of the three men sent to Japan.
Can you see the white men's eyes pop out of their heads with astonishment? They thought they were up against a case of labor union jealousy, and they found themselves involved in a complex race problem, dealing with three aggressive applicants for places at the councils of rulers governing the world. California was ordered to turn on the soft pedal and do it quick, and officially, at least, she did for a time. Canada was ordered to lay both hands across her mouth and never to speak above a whisper of the whole Brown Brother problem; and England—well—England openly took the Jappy-Chappy at his word—recognized him as a world brother and entered into the famous alliance. And the coming of coolies suddenly stopped to the United States and Canada. It didn't stop to South America and Mexico, but that is another play of the game with facts for chessmen.
Chinese exclusion, Japanese exclusion, Hindu exclusion suddenly became party shibboleths—always for the partyoutof power, never for the partyinpower. The party in power kept a special Maxim silencer on the subject of Oriental immigration. The politician in office kept one finger on his lip and wore rubber-soled shoes whenever an almond-eyed was mentioned. With that beautiful consistency which only a politician has, a good British Columbia member, who rode Oriental exclusion as his special hobbyhorse, employed a Jap cook. In the midst of his stump campaign against Orientals he found in the room of his cook original drawings of Fort Esquimalt, of Vancouver Harbor and of Victoria back country. I was in British Columbia at the time. The funny thing to me was—all British Columbia was so deadly in earnest it didn't see the funny side of the inconsistency.
I was up and down the Pacific the year the Mikado died, and chanced to be in San Diego the month that a Japanese warship put into port because its commander had suicided of grief over the Emperor's death. The ship had to lie in port till a new commander came out from Japan. Japanese coolies were no longer coming; but the Japanese middies had the run and freedom of the harbor; and they sketched all the whereabouts of Point Loma—purely out of interest for Mrs. Tingley's Theosophy, of course.
Diaz's ministry had been very hard pressed financially before being ousted by Madero. Some Boston and Pacific Coast men had secured an option from the Diaz faction of the sandy reaches known as Magdalena Bay in Lower California. The Pacific Coast is a land of few good natural harbors; especially harbors for a naval station and target practice. Suddenly an unseen hand blocked negotiations. Within a year Japan had almost leased Magdalena Bay, when Uncle Sam wakened up and ordered "hands off."
Nicaragua has never been famous as a great fishing country. Yet Japanese fishermen tried to lease fishing rights there and may have, for all the world knows. In spite of exclusion acts, they already dominate the salmon fishing of the Pacific.
Coaling facilities will be provided for the merchantmen of the world at both ends of Panama. Yet when England and France began furbishing up colonial stations in the Caribbean, Japan forthwith made offers for a site for a coaling station in the Gulf of Mexico.
But it was in South America and Mexico that the most active colonization proceeded. There is not an American diplomat in South America who does not know this and who has not reported it—reported it with one finger on both lips and then has seen his report discreetly smothered in departmental pigeon-holes. Up to a few years ago Mexico and South America were enjoying marvelous prosperity. Coffee had not collapsed in Brazil. Banks had not blown up from self-inflation in Argentina. Revolution at home and war abroad had not closed mines in Mexico. All hands were stretched out for colonists. Japan launched vast trans-Pacific colonization schemes. Ships were sent scouting commercial possibilities in South America. To colonists in Chile and Peru, fare was in many cases prepaid. Money was loaned to help the colonists establish themselves, and an American representative to one of these countries told me that free passage was given colonists on furlough home if they would go back to the colony. There is no known record outside Japan of the numbers of these colonists. And Japan asks—why not? Does not England colonize; does not Germany colonize; does not France colonize? We are taking our place at the world board of trade. If we fail to make good, throw us out. If we make good, we do not ask "by your leave."
When a shipping investigation was on in Washington a year ago, many members of the committee were amazed to learn that Japan already controls seventy-two per cent. of the shipping on the Pacific. Ask a Chilean or Peruvian whether he prefers to travel on an American or a Japanese ship. He laughs and answers that American ships to the western coast of South America would be as tubs are to titanics—only until the new registry bill passed there were hardly any ships under the United States flag on the Southern Pacific. Each of these Japanese ships is so heavily subsidized it could run without a passenger or a cargo; high as one hundred thousand dollars a voyage for many ships. Its crews are paid eight to ten dollars a month, where American and Canadian crews demand and get forty to fifty dollars. In cheapness of labor, in efficiency of service, in government aid and style of building no American nor Canadian ships can stand up against them. And again Japan asks—why not? Atlantic commerce is a prize worth four billions a year. When the Orient fully awakens, will Pacific commerce total four billions a year? Who rules the sea rules the world. Japan's ships dominate seventy-two per cent. of the Pacific's commerce now.
So when the war broke out, Japan shouldered not the white man's burden but the Brown Brother's and plunged in to police Asia. Again—why not? As Uncle Sam polices the two Americas, and John Bull the seas of the world, so the Mikado undertakes to police the sea lanes of the Orient. The Jappy said when he met the diplomats on the subject of coolie immigration that he would prove himself the partner of the white man at the world's council boards—or step back.
Is it a menace or a portent? Certainly not a menace, when accepted as a matter of fact. Only the fact must be faced and realized, and the new chessman's moves recognized. Uncle Sam has the police job of one world, South America; Great Britain of another—Europe. Will the little Jappy-Chappy take the job for that other world, where the Star of the Orient seems to be swinging into new orbits? The Jappy-Chappy isn't saying much; but he is essentially on the job for all he is worth; and Canada hasn't wakened up to what that may mean to her Pacific Coast.
Is it, then, that Canada fears the growth of Japan as a great world power? No, the thing is deeper than that. We have come to the place where we must go deeper than surface signs and use neither rose water nor kid gloves. The question of the Chinese and the Japanese is entirely distinct from the Hindu.
If you think that shutting your eyes to what you don't want to know and stopping your nostrils to the stench and gathering your garments up and passing by on the other side ever settled a difficult question, then the Pacific Coast wishes you joy to your system of moral sanitation; but don't offer the people of the Pacific Coast any platitudinous advice about admitting Asiatics. They know what they are doing. You don't! Theoretically the Asiatic should have the same liberty to come and go with Canada as Canadians have to come and go with the Orient. Theoretically, also, the colored man should be as clean and upright and free-and-equal and dependable as the white man; but practically—in an anguish that has cost the South blood and tears—practically he isn't. The theory does not work out. Neither does it with the Asiatic. That is, it does not work out at close range on the spot, instead of the width of half a continent away.
Canada is being asked to decide and legislate on one of the most vital race problems that ever confronted a nation. She is also being asked to be very lily-handed and ladylike and dainty about it all. You must not explore facts that are not—"nice." You must not ask what the Westerner means when he says that "the Asiatic will not affiliate with our civilization." Is it more than white teeth and pigments of the skin? Is it more than skin deep? Had the Old Book some deep economic reason when it warned the children of Israel against mixing their blood with aliens? Has it all anything to do with the centuries' cesspools of unbridled vice? Is that the reason that women's clubs—knowing less of such things—rather than men's clubs—are begged to pass fool resolutions about admitting races of whose living practices they know absolutely nothing?
If it isn't the labor unions and it isn't the fear of new national power that prejudice against the Oriental—what is it? Why has almost every woman's club on the Pacific passed resolutions against the admission of the Oriental, and almost every woman's club in the East passed resolutions for the admission? Why did the former Minister of Labor in Canada say that "a minimum of publicity is desired upon this subject"? What did he mean when he declared "that the native of India is not a person suited to this country"? If the native Hindu is "not a person suited to Canada"—climate, soil, moisture, what not?—why isn't that fact sufficient to exclude the Oriental without any legislation? Italians never go to live at the North Pole. Nor do Eskimos come to live in the tropics.
You may ask questions about Hindu immigration till you are black in the face. Unless you go out on the spot to the Pacific Coast, the most you will get for an answer is a "hush." And it would not be such an impossible situation if the other side were also going around with a finger to the lip and a "hush"; but the Oriental isn't. The Hindu and his advocates go from one end of Canada to the other clamoring at the tops of their voices, not for the privilege, but for the right, of admission to Canada, the right to vote, the right to colonize. At the time the first five or six thousand were dumped on the Pacific Coast, twenty thousand more were waiting to take passage; and one hundred thousand more were waiting to take passage after them, clamoring for the right of admission, the right to vote, the right to colonize. Canada welcomes all other colonists. Why not these? The minute you ask, you are told to "hush."
South Africa and Australia "hushed" so very hard and were so very careful that after a very extensive experience—150,000 Hindus settled in one colony—both colonies legislated to shut them out altogether. At least South Africa's educational test amounted to that, and South Africa and Australia are quite as imperial as Canada. Why did they do it? The labor unions were no more behind the exclusion in those countries than in British Columbia. The labor unions chuckled with glee over the embarrassment of the whole question.
Each side of the question must be stated plainly, not as my personal opinions or the opinions of any one, but as the arguments of those advocating the free admission of the Hindu, and of those furiously opposing the free admission.
A few years ago British Columbia was at her wit's ends for laborers—men for the mills, the mines, the railroads. India was at her wit's ends because of surplus of labor—labor for which her people were glad to receive three, ten, twenty cents a day. Her people were literally starving for the right to live. It does not matter much who acted as the connecting link,—the sawmill owners, the canneries, the railroads, or the steamships. The steamship lines and the sawmill men seem to have been the combined sinners. The mills wanted labor. The steamship lines saw a chance to transport laborers at the rate of twenty thousand a year to and from India. The Hindus came tumbling in at the rate of six thousand in a single year, when, suddenly, British Columbia, inert at first, awakened and threatened to secede or throw the newcomers into the sea. By intervention of the Imperial government and the authorities of India a sort of subterfuge was rigged up in the immigration laws. The Hindus had been booked to British Columbia via Hong Kong and Hawaii. The most of the Japs had come by way of Hawaii. To kill two birds with one stone, by order-in-council in Ottawa, the regulation was enacted forbidding the admission of immigrants except on continuous passage from the land of birth. Canada's immigration law also permits great latitude in interpretation as to the amount of money that must be possessed by the incoming settlers. Ordinarily it is fifty dollars for winter, twenty-five dollars for summer, with a five hundred dollar poll tax against the Chinaman. The Hindus were required to have two hundred and fifty dollars on their person.
One wonders at the simplicity of a nation that hopes to fence itself in safety behind laws that are pure subterfuge. The subterfuge has but added irritation to friction. What was to hinder a direct line of steamships going into operation any day? As a matter of fact, to force the issue, to force the Dominion to declare the status of the Oriental, a Japanese ship early in 1914 did come direct from India with a cargo of angry armed Hindus demanding entrance. Canada refused to relent. The ship lay in harbor for months unable to land its colonists, and a Dominion cruiser patrolled Vancouver water to prevent actual armed conflict. When the final decision ordered the colonists on board deported, knives and rifles were brandished; and Hopkinson, the secret service man employed by British authorities, was openly shot to death a few weeks later in a Vancouver court room by a band of Hindu assassins. "We are glad we did it," declared the murderers when arrested. Hopkinson himself had come from India and was hated and feared owing to his secret knowledge of revolutionary propaganda among the Vancouver Hindus, who were posing as patriots and British subjects. The fact that many thousands of Sikhs and Hindus had just been hurried across Canada in trains with blinds down to fight for the empire in Europe added tragic complexity to an already impossible situation.
The leaders of the Hindu party in Canada had already realized that more immigration was not advisable till they had stronger backing of public opinion in Canada, and a campaign of publicity was begun from Nova Scotia to the Pacific Coast. Churches, women's missionary societies, women's clubs, men's clubs were addressed by Hindu leaders from one end of Canada to the other. It did not improve the temper of some of these leaders posing in flowing garments of white as mystic saints before audiences of women to know that Hopkinson, the secret agent, was on their trail in the shadow with proofs of criminal records on the part of these same leaders. These criminal records Hopkinson would willingly have exposed had the Imperial government not held his hand. When I was in Vancouver he called to see me and promised me a full exposure of the facts, but before speaking cabled for permission to speak. Permission was flatly refused, and I was told that I was investigating things altogether too deeply. I can see the secret agent's face yet—as he sat bursting with facts repressed by Imperial order—a solemn, strong, relentless man, sad and savage with the knowledge he could not use. Without Hopkinson's aid, it was not difficult to get the facts. Canada is a country of party government. One party had just been ousted from power, and another party had just come in. While I was waiting for permission from Ottawa to obtain facts in the open, information came to me voluntarily with proofs through the wife of a former secret agent.
It did not make things easier for Hopkinson that the whole dispute as to Hindu immigration was relegated into that doubtful resort of all ambiguous politics—"the twilight zone"—or the doubtful borderland where provincial powers end and federal powers begin and Imperial powers intervene. England was shoving the burden of decision on the Dominion, and the Dominion was shoving the burden on the Province of British Columbia, and to evade responsibility each government was shuttling the thing back and forward, weaving a tangle of hate and misunderstanding which culminated in Hopkinson's assassination in 1914.
As "the twilight zone" between provincial and federal rights comes up here, it should be considered and emphasized; for it is the one great weakness of every federation.Whois to dowhat—when neither government wants to assume responsibility? Who is to enforce laws, when neither government wants to father them? It was this gave such passion to Vancouver's resentment in Hindu immigration. Indeed this very question of "a twilight zone" gives pause to many an Imperial Federationist. In a dispute of this sort, involving the parts of the empire, could England give force to an exclusion act without losing the allegiance to her British Empire?
Every conceivable argument has been used in this Hindu dispute. I want to emphasize—they arearguments, used for argument's sake—not reasons. The plain brutal bald reasons on each side of the dispute are British Columbia doesnotwant the Hindus. The Hindus want British Columbia. Simultaneously with the campaign for publicity action was taken: (1) to force the resident Hindu on the voters' list; (2) to break down the immigration laws by demanding the entrance of wives and families; (3) to force recognition of the status of the Oriental by bringing them in the ships of Japan—England's ally.
If the resident Hindu had a vote—and as a British subject, why not?—and if he could break down the immigration exclusion act, he could out-vote the native-born Canadian in ten years. In Canada are five and one-half million native born, two million aliens. In India are hundreds of millions breaking the dykes of their own national barriers and ready to flood any open land. Take down the barriers on the Pacific Coast, and there would be ten million Hindus in Canada in ten years. The drawing of Japan into the quarrel by chartering a Japanese ship was a crafty move. Japan is the empire's ally. Offense to Japan means war.
The arguments from both sides I set down in utter disinterest personally.Here they are:
We need room for colonization—says the Hindu. Let England lose India, and she loses five-sixths of the British Empire. By refusing admission to the Hindu, Canada is endangering British dominion in India. Moral conditions there are appalling, of course; but say the missionaries—give these people a chance, and they will become as good as any of us. Are we not sprung from the same Aryan stock?
British Columbia has immense tracts of arable land. Why not give India's millions a chance on it as colonizers?
There is not so much sedition among the Hindus of British Columbia as among Canadian-born Socialists, who rant of the flag as "the bloody rag."
The vices of the Hindu are no worse than the vices of the low whites.
They are British subjects and have a right to admission. Admission is not a privilege but a right.
How can we expect good morals among three to five thousand men who are forcibly separated from wives and children? Admit their wives to prevent deterioration. This argument was used by a Hindu addressing audiences in Toronto.
What right have Canadians to point the finger of scorn at the reproach of the child wife when the age of marriage in one province is twelve years?
In the days of the mutiny the Sikh proved his loyalty. To-day the Indian troops are proving their loyalty by fighting for the empire in Europe.
Many of the Canadians now denouncing the Hindu made money selling them real estate in Vancouver, and expropriation is behind the idea of exclusion.
The admission of the Hindu would relieve British Columbia's great need for manual laborers.
Canadian missionaries to India are received as friends. Why are theHindus not received as friends in Canada?
Why should a Sikh not marry a white woman as one did in Vancouver? This question was asked by the official publication of the Sikhs in Vancouver.
If Canada shuts her doors to the Hindus, let the Hindus shut doors toCanadians.
These are not my arguments. They are the arguments of the people advocating the free admission of people from India to Canada.
To these arguments the Pacific Coast makes answer. Likewise, the answer is not mine:
We know that you as a people need room for colonization; but if we admit you as colonists, will your presence drive out other colonists, as it has done in Australia and South Africa; as the presence of colored people prevents the coming of other colonists to the southern states? If we have to decide between having you and excluding Canadians, or excluding you and having Canadians, we can not afford to hesitate in our decision. We must keep our own land for our own people.
Australia and South Africa have excluded the Hindu—South Africa's educational test amounts to that—and that has not imperiled British dominion in India. Why should it in Canada? The very fact there are millions ready to come is what alarms us. Morals are low—you acknowledge—and your people would be better if they had a chance; but would the chance not cost us too dearly, as the improvement of the blacks has cost the South in crime and contaminated blood? We are sorry for you, just as we are sorry for any plague-stricken region; but we do not welcome you among us because of that pity.
There may not be so much sedition among the Hindus of British Columbia as among Canadian-born Socialists, who rant of the flag as "a bloody rag"; but our Socialistic seditionists have never yet been accused of collecting two million dollars to send home to India to buy rifles for the revolution. Canadian Socialists have never yet collected one dime to buy rifles. These are not my accusations. They are accusations that have been in the very air of Vancouver and San Francisco. If they are true, they ought to be proved true. If they are untrue, they ought to be proved untrue; but in view of the shoutings over patriotism and of Hopkinson's assassination, they come with a rude jar to claims grounded on loyalty. Could Hindus who landed in British Columbia destitute a few years ago possibly have that amount of money among them? At last census they had property in Vancouver alone to the amount of six million dollars, held collectively for the whole community.
Their vices may be no worse than the vices of the low whites, but if immigration officials find that whites low or high have vices, those whites are excluded, be they English, Irish, Scotch, or Greek.
The Hindus are British subjects, but Canada does not admit British subjects unless she wants them—unless they can give a clean bill of health and morals.
Canada does not regard admission as a right to any race, European, Asian, African. She considers her citizenship a privilege and reserves to herself the right to extend or not to extend that privilege to whom she will.
That separation from families will excuse base and lewd morals is a view that Canada will never admit. Her sons go forth unaccompanied by wives or sisters to lumber camps and mines and pioneer shacks, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred come back clean as they went forth, and manlier. That women should be victims on an altar of lust is an argument that may appeal to the Asiatic—the sentiment all draped in wisteria and lilies, of course; but it isn't an argument that will prove anything in Canada but the advocate's unfitness for citizenship.
What reason have Canadians to point the finger of reproach at the institution of the child wife, when the age of marriage in one province is low as twelve? And that brings up the whole question of the child wife. Because one province has the marriage age criminally low does not prove that that province approves of marriages at twelve. In the whole history of that province marriages at that age have been as rare as the pastime of skinning a man alive, and that province has no specific law against skinning a man alive. It has no such law because that type of crime is unknown. But can it be said that the institution of child marriage is an unknown or even a rare crime in India? The Hindu wives for whom loud outcry is being made are little girls barely eight years of age, whom before marriage the husbands have never seen, men of thirty-five and forty and forty-eight. Does Canada desire the system of the child wife embodied in her national life? Suppose one hundred thousand Hindu colonists came to the vacant arable lands of British Columbia. As the inalienable right of a British subject, the colonist must be allowed to bring in his wife. What if she is a child to whom he was married in her infancy? The colonist being a British subject is to be given a vote. How would Canada abolish the child wife system if Hindu votes outnumbered Canadian votes? Forget all about the rifle fund—the discovery of which was paid for in Hopkinson's life! Forget all about labor and mill owner and color of pigments! You know now why the Oriental question is more than skin-deep. Go a little deeper in this child-wife thing! Don't balk at the horror of it! The Pacific Coast wants you to know a few medical facts. Hundreds of thousands of children in India, age from nine to twelve, are wives actually living with husbands; and the husbands are in many cases from thirty to eighty years of age. Anglo-Saxons regard these unions as criminal. One-third of all children born of mothers under sixteen years of age die in infancy because of the tortures to the mother's body, compared to which the tortures of the Inquisition were merciful. Does Canada want that system embodied in her national life? Under Canadian law such crimes are treated to thirty-nine lashes: under American law to Judge Lynch. Twenty-five per cent. of the women of India die prematurely because of the crimes perpetrated through child marriage. Twenty-five per cent. become invalids from the same cause. Nine million girl wives in India are under fifteen years of age; two million are under eleven.
I asked a British Columbia sawmill owner why the Hindu could not speed up with a Pole or Swede.
"No stamina," he answered. "Too many generations of vice! Too many generations of birth from immature mothers; no dower of strength from birth."
The advocates of Hindu colonization in Canada glibly advise "prohibiting child wives." To bar out child wives sounds easy. How are you to know they are child wives and not daughters? If one thing more than another has been established in Vancouver about Hindus, not excepting the leaders, it is that you can not believe a Hindu under oath. Also British law does not allow you to bar out a subject's wife unless she be diseased or vicious. If you let down the bar to any section of the Hindu, teeming millions will come—with a demand to vote.
That Canada's continuous passage law is immoral and intolerable no one denies. It is a subterfuge and a joke. The day the Japanese steamship tested the law by bringing passengers direct from land of birth the law fell down and Canada had to face squarely the question of exclusion. As the world knows, the shipload of human cargo after lying for months in Vancouver Harbor was sent back, and Hindu leaders proved their claims of a right to citizenship by assassinating Hopkinson.
To the claim that the Sikhs are loyal, Canada answers—"for their own sake." If British protection were withdrawn from India to-morrow, a thousand petty chiefs would fly at one another's throats. The idea that expropriation is behind exclusion could be entertained only by an Oriental mind. Expropriation is possible under Canadian law only for treason. Imperial unity is no more threatened in Canada by exclusion than it was threatened in South Africa and Australia. The Hindus are adapted to the cultivation of the soil, but if they come in millions, will any white race sit down beside them? Why does immigration persistently refuse to go to the southern states? Because of a black shadow over the land. Does Canada want such a shadow?
The missionary argument can hardly be taken seriously. Missionaries do not go to India to colonize. They do not introduce white vices. They go at Canada's expense to give free medical and social service to India.
"Why should a Sikh not marry a white woman?" There, again, you are up against a side of the subject that is neither violet water nor pink tea; but—it is a vital side of the subject. For the same reason that the South objects to and passes laws against mixed unions of the races. These laws are not the registration of prejudice. They are the registration of terrible lessons in experience. It is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of fact. What is feared is not the marriage of a Sikh who is refined to a white woman who knows what she is doing. What is feared is the effect of that union on the lewd Hindu; the effect on the safety of the uncultured white woman and white girl. Any one on the Coast who has lived next to Asiatics, any one in India or the Philippines knows what this means in terms of hideous terrible fact that can not be set down here. Vancouver knows. "I'll see," said an officer in the Philippines of his native valet, "that the—dog turns up missing;" and every man present knew why; and when the officer set out on an unnamed expedition with his valet, the valet did "turn up missing." There are vices for which a white man kills. "Have not the English carried vices to India?" a Hindu protagonist asked me. Yes, answered British Columbia, but we do not purpose poisoning the new young life of Canada to compensate the vices of English soldiers who have gone to pieces morally in India.
As to shutting Canadians out of India, Canada would accept that challenge gladly. When Canadians carry vices to India—says Canada—shut them out.
These are the reasons given for the Pacific Coast's aversion to the Hindu, and even with the arguments stated explicitly, there is a great deal untold and untellable.
For instance, some of the leaders talking loudest in Eastern Canada in the name of the Sikh are not Sikhs at all, and one at least has a criminal record in San Francisco.
For instance again, when the coronation festivities were on in England, there was a very peculiar guard kept round the Hindu quarters. It would be well for some of the eastern women's clubs to inquire why that was; also why the fact was hushed up that two white women of bad character were carried out of that compound dead.
Said a mill owner, one who employs many Hindus, "If the East could understand how some of these penniless leaders grow rich, they would realize that the Hindu has our employment sharks beaten to a frazzle. I take in a new man from one of these leaders. The leader gets two dollars or five dollars for finding this fellow a job. I have barely got the man broken in when the leader yanks him off to another job and sends me a new man, getting, of course, the employment agent fee for both changes."
"But why not let them come out here and work and go back?" asks the East.
Because that is just what the Hindu will not do. When he comes, he fights for the franchise to stay. That is the real meaning behind the fight over cases now in the courts.
"They are curious fellows, poor beggars," said a police court official to me. "They have no more conception of what truth means than a dog stealing a bone. We had a Hindu come in here as complainant against another man, with his back hacked to beef steak. We had very nearly sent the defendant up for a long term in the 'pen,' when we got wind that these two fellows had been bitter enemies—old spites—and that there was something queer about the complainant's shanty. We sent out to examine. The fellow had stuck bits of glass all over the inside of his shack walls and then cut his own back to pay an old grudge against the other man. Another fellow rushed in here gesticulating complaint, who was literally soaked in blood. We had had our experience and so sending for an interpreter, we soused this fellow into a bathtub. Every dab came off and there was not a scratch under."
"You say the Hindu is the negro problem multiplied by ten, plus craft," said a life-long resident of India to me. "That is hardly correct. The Hindu is different from the negro. He is intellectual and spiritual as well as crafty and sensuous. You will never have trouble with the Hindu, if you keep him in his place—"
"But do you think a democratic country can what you call 'keep a race in its place'? The very genius of our democracy is that we want each individual to come up out of his place to a higher place."
"Then you will learn a hard lesson here in Canada."
What kind of a lesson? Again, let us take facts, not opinions!
A clergyman's wife in Vancouver, full of missionary zeal for India, thought it her duty to accord the Hindu exactly the same treatment as to an American or English immigrant. She took a man as general house servant and treated him with the same genial courtesy she had treated all other help in her home. You know what is coming—don't you? The man mistook it for evil or else failed to subdue the crimes of the centuries in his own blood. Had he not come from a land where a woman more or less did not matter, and hundreds of thousands of little girls are yearly sacrificed on the altars of Moloch? I need not give details. As a matter of fact, there are none. Asiatic ideas about women collided violently with facts which any Canadian takes for granted and does not talk about! No Anglo-Saxon (thank God) is too ladylike not to have a bit of the warrior woman left in her blood. The Hindu was thrown out of that house. Then the woman reasoned with the blind persistence peculiar to any conscientious good woman, who always puts theory in place of fact! There are blackguards in every race. There are scoundrels among Englishmen in India. Why should she allow one criminal among the Hindus to prejudice her against this whole people? And she at once took another Hindu man servant in the house. This time she kept him in the kitchen and garden. Within a month the same thing happened with a little daughter. This Hindu also went out on his head. No more were employed in that house. That woman's husband was one of the Pacific Coast clergymen who passed the resolution, "that the Hindus would not affiliate with our Canadian civilization."
Personally I think that resolution would have been a great deal more enlightening to the average Easterner if the ministerial association had plainly called a spade a spade.
With the Chinaman conditions are different. In the first place, since China obtained freedom from the old cast-iron dynasty, Chinamen have not wanted to colonize in Canada. The leaders of the young China party laid their plots and published their liberty journals from presses in the basement of Vancouver and Victoria shops, but having gained their liberty, they went back to China. The Chinaman does not want to colonize. He does not want a vote. He wants only to earn his money on the Pacific Coast and hoard it and go home to China with it. The fact that he does not want to remain in the country but comes only to work and go back has always been used as an argument against him. Neither does he consider himself your equal. Nor does he want to marry your daughter, nor have you consider him a prince of the royal blood in disguise—a pose in which the little Jap is as great an adept as the English cockney who drops enough "h's" to build a monument, all the while he is telling you of his royal blue blood. If you mistake the Chinaman for a prince in disguise, the results will be just what they were with a poor girl In New York four or five years ago. The results will be just what they always are when you mistake a mongrel for a thoroughbred.
All the same, dismiss the idea from your mind that labor is behind the opposition to Chinese immigration! A few years ago, when Oriental labor came tumbling into British Columbia at the rate of twelve thousand in a single year—when the Chinese alone had come to number fifteen or sixteen thousand—labor was alarmed; but a twofold change has taken place since that time. First, labor has found that it can better control the Chinaman by letting him enter Canada, than by keeping him in China and letting the product of cheap labor come in. Second, the Chinaman has demonstrated his solidarity as a unit in the labor war. If he comes, he will not foregather with capital. That is certain! He will affiliate with the unions for higher wages.
"If the Chinaman comes in here lowering the price of goods and the price of labor," said the agitator a few years ago, "we'll put a poll tax of five hundred dollars on and make him pay for his profit." The poll tax was put on every Chinaman coming into Canada, but do you think John Chinaman pays it? It is a way that unjust laws have of coming back in a boomerang. The Chinaman doesn't pay it! Mr. Canadian Householder paid it; for no sooner was the poll tax imposed than up went wages for household servant and laundryman and gardener, from ten to fifteen dollars a month to forty and forty-five and fifty dollars a month. The Italian boss system came in vogue, when the rich Chinaman who paid the entrance tax for his "slaves" farmed out the labor at a profit to himself. The system was really one of indentured slavery till the immigration authorities went after it. Then Chinese benevolent associations were formed. Up went wages automatically. The cook would no longer do the work of the gardener. When the boy you hired at twenty-five dollars had learned his job, he suddenly disappeared one morning. His substitute explains he has had to go away; "he is sick;" any excuse; with delightful lapses of English when you ask questions. You find out that your John has taken a job at forty dollars a month, and you are breaking in a new green hand for the Chinese benevolent association to send up to a higher job. If you kick against the trick, you may kick! There are more jobs than men. That's the way you pay the five hundred dollars poll tax; comical, isn't it; or it would be comical if the average white householder did not find it five hundred dollars more than the average income can spare? So the labor leaders chuckle at this subterfuge, as they chuckle at the "continuous" passage law.
For a time the indentured slavery system worked almost criminally; for if the newcomer, ignorant of the law and the language, got wise to the fact that his boss was doing what was illegal under Canadian law, and attempted to jump his serfdom, he was liable—as one of them expressed it—"to be found missing." It would be reported that he had suicided. Among people who did not speak English, naturally, no details would be given. It seems almost unbelievable that in a country wrestling with the whole Asiatic problem the fact has to be set down that the government has no interpreter among the Chinese who is not a Chinaman, no interpreter among the Japanese who is not a Jap. As it chances, the government happens to have two reliable foreigners as interpreters; but they are foreigners.
Said Doctor Munro, one of the medical staff of the Immigration Department: "Even in complicated international negotiations, where each country is jockeying to protect its rights, Canada has to depend on representatives of China or Japan to translate state documents and transmit state messages. Here we are on the verge of great commercial intercourse with two of the richest countries in Asia, countries that are just awakening from the century's sleep, countries that will need our flour and our wheat and our lumber and our machinery; and we literally have not a diplomatic body in Canada to speak either Chinese or Japanese. I'll tell you what a lot of us would like to see done—what the southern states are doing with the Latin-Spanish of South America—have a staff of translators for our chambers of commerce and boards of trade, or price files and lists of markets, etc. How could this be brought about? Let Japan and China send yearly, say twenty students to study international law and English with us. Let us send to China and Japan yearly twenty of our postgraduate students to be trained up into a diplomatic body for our various boards of trade, to forward international trade and help the two countries to understand each other.
"When trouble arose over Oriental immigration a few years ago," continued Doctor Munro, "I can tell you that it was a serious matter that we had to have the translating of our state documents done at that time by representatives of the very nations we were contesting."
Unless I am misinformed, one of the men who did the translating at that time is one of the Orientals who has since "suicided," and the reason for that suicide you might as well try to fathom as to follow the windings of a ferret in the dark. Certain royal clans of Japan will suicide on order from their government for the good of their country.
"The trouble with these foolish raids on Chinatown for gambling," said an educated Chinaman in Vancouver to me, "is that the city police have no secret service among the Chinese, and they never raid the resorts that need most to be cleaned out. They raid some little joint where the Chinese boys are playing fan-tan for ten cents, when they do not raid up-town gambling hells where white men play for hundreds of dollars. If the police employed Chinese secret service, they could clean out every vice resort in a week. Except in the segregated district, which is white, there would not be any vice. They need Chinese police or men who speak Chinese, and there would be no Chinese vice left in this town."
To go back to the matter of the poll tax and the system of indentured slavery, the bosses mapped out every part of the city and province in wage areas. Here, no wages under twenty-five dollars, to which green hands were sent; here, a better quarter, no wages under forty dollars; and so on up as high as sixty dollars for mill work and camp cooking. About this time riots turned the searchlight on all matters Oriental; and the boss system merged in straight industrial unionism. You still go to a boss to get your gangs of workmen; but the boss is secretary of a benevolent association; and if he takes any higher toll than an employment agent's commission, the immigration department has never been able to detect it. "I have no hesitation in saying," declared an immigration official, "that for four years there has not been a case of boss slavery that could be proved in the courts. There has not been a case that could be proved in the courts of women and children being brought in for evil purposes. Only merchants' wives, students, and that class can come in. The other day an old fellow tried to bring a young woman in. We suspected he had left an old wife in China; but we could not prove it; so we charged him five hundred dollars for the entrance of this one and had them married on the spot. Whenever there is the slightest doubt about their being married, we take no chances, charge them five hundred dollars and have the knot tied right here and now. Then the man has to treat the woman as a wife and support her; or she can sue him; and we can punish and deport him. There is no more of little girls being brought in to be sold for slavery and worse."
All the same, some evils of the boss system still exist. The boss system taught the Chinaman organization, and to-day, even with higher wages, your forty-five dollars a month cook will do no gardening. You ask him why. "They will cut my throat," he tells you; and if he goes out to mow the lawn, he is soon surrounded by fellow countrymen who hoot and jeer him.
"Would they cut his throat?" I asked a Chinaman.
"No; but maybe, the benevolent association or his tong fine him."
So you see why labor no longer fears the Chinaman and welcomes him to industrial unionism, a revolution in the attitude of labor which has taken place in the last year. Make a note of these facts:
The poll tax has trebled expenses for the householder.
The poll tax has created industrial unionism among the Chinese.
The poll tax has not kept the Chinaman out.
How about the Chinese vices? Are they a stench to Heaven as the Hindu's? I can testify that they certainly are not open, and they certainly are not aggressive, and they certainly do not claim vice as a right; for I went through Vancouver's Chinatown with only a Chinaman as an escort (not through "underground dens," as one paper reported it) after ten at night; and the vices that I saw were innocent, mild, pallid, compared to the white-man vices of Little Italy, New York, or Upper Broadway. We must have visited in all a dozen gambling joints, two or three midnight restaurants, half a dozen opium places and two theaters; and the only thing that could be remotely constructed into disrespect was the amazement on one drunken white face on the street that a white woman could be going through Chinatown with a Chinaman. Instead of playing for ten and one hundred dollars, as white men and women gamble up-town, the Chinese boys were huddling intently over dice boxes, or playing fan-tan with fevered zeal for ten cents. Instead of drinking absinthe, one or two sat smoking heavily, with the abstracted stare of the opium victim. In the midnight restaurants some drunken sailors sat tipsily, eating chop suey. Goldsmiths were plying their fine craftsmanship. Presses were turning out dailies with the news of the Chinese revolution. Grocery stores, theaters, markets, all were open; for Chinatown never sleeps.