THE HINDU
I
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.
II
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. _Who_ is to do _what_--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 are _arguments_, used for argument's sake--not
reasons. The plain brutal bald reasons on each side of the dispute are
British Columbia does _not_ want 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.
III
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 the
Hindus 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 to
Canadians.
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.
IV
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.