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.