“What do you think of this talk of republics, foreign loans, centralized government, armies and railways?”
There is no sycamore tree for Zacchæus to climb; he must come down. They know you are peaceful as an amateur, but they insist on your professional opinion, and they believe your profession is something more practical than talking religion. Are you a doctor, a government employé, a farmer, a soldier, a spy, an artisan, a merchant? If so, you must know about these practical things, and can answer the questions propounded.
The emigration treaties now stand in almost a humorous attitude in one respect. To save Japan’s “face” (the Oriental idiom for pride), Japan is granted permission to land coolies, but Japan by a secret postscriptum agrees not to let her coolies make the slightest use of this permission, as she has room for them in Korea, Manchuria, the navy, etc., at present. China is not permitted to land her coolies, but land some of them she does by the “underground”, which runs via Canada, Mexico, Central America, Cuba, etc. Our Pacific coast is correct, notwithstanding the exigencies of diplomacy, that she can not and will not absorb Oriental labor, any more than we foist Occidental labor on the Orient. The Pacific coast is quite consistent for the “square deal”, though it took her some time to trust the signing of the 1911 Japan Treaty, the immigration clause of which it is secretly understood is not to be taken advantage of. America can not welcome too many Chinese students and travelers, and a certain number of specialized merchants, agriculturalists, agents, artisans and artists, whom we can well accept as our tutors in their specialties.
On the subject of Asiatic immigration, the authority on American naval and foreign affairs, Admiral Mahan, writes as follows: “A large preponderance of Asiatics in a given region is a real annexation, more effective than the political annexations against which the Monroe doctrine was formulated. Free Asiatic immigration to the Pacific coast in its present condition of sparse population would mean Asiatic occupation—Asia colonized in America. This the United States government can not accept because of the violent resistance of the Pacific states, if for no other reason.”
In a former book I have recommended the immigration of a number of Chinese into the Philippines. The Straits Settlements cover only a small area. Their population is 300,000 Malays, who are akin to the Filipino. Four hundred thousand Chinese were brought in, and the little colony in 1911 exported $200,000,000 of tin and other products. Sir Frank Swettenham, the famous governor of the settlement in its formative period up to 1904, says of the Chinese: “The industrial development of the country is entirely due to the Chinese. They are the only people in the peninsula who can be depended upon. They tolerate no interruptions in the performance of their daily labor, and save their money to make prudent investments. Without the Chinese nothing would have been done in the Malay states. No progress would have been made, and the enormous natural resources of the country would still be lying dormant.” A remarkable instance of the orderliness of the Chinese was exhibited in the deportation in 1908 of 60,000 Chinese emigrants from the Transvaal gold mines to China. Such a body of any other labor would have shown many signs of rebellion against their removal from the scenes to which they had grown attached, and where they were prospering, and against the hot journey of 8,000 miles, made the more unpleasant because of the crowded quarters on shipboard. No friction or disturbance marked this unusual industrial event. Coolies though they were, they kept their word like statesmen, and said: “We promised the colony that we would only substitute black labor for four years, and as the blacks now are ready to return to the field, we are going.”
The nations should get together, and permit China to levy a provisional import duty of twelve per cent. instead of five per cent., and not keep her government helpless because of starvation. If she had an army and navy like Japan, she would not need to ask the permission of others to allow her own government to live. Advice should be given to her, as in the Mackay Treaty, to strike away the inter-provincial and inter-district fetters of likin (transit taxes) and export tax, by which method the provinces raise much of their revenue; and the government should divide up the customs receipts between the provinces, or permit the provinces to keep all their land tax.
France, which owns the only railway to Yunnan at present, is imposing an unjust transit tax of ten per cent. on American, British and German goods, shipped from Hongkong to Yunnan, or vice versa, and which must cross French China. Canada in the same situation bids for American freights by making no transit tax, and indeed quoting lower freight rates; this is intelligent modernism. China and the three commercial nations should have this Indo-Chinese tax removed, and demand equal rates on French railways. This rate equalization is what America has demanded of Japan and Russia on railways in Manchuria. It is the same thing that Germany, at the point of the Panther’s cannon, demanded of France in the Agadir incident in Morocco. In other words, the “square deal”, and it must be put in effect, say the Chinese people and the nations which advocate the “open door”.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
The Gothic type of architecture introduced by the French; the Catholic cathedral on Caine Road, on the slope of Hongkong. Chinese contractors erect these buildings.