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.