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.