In fairness to these business interests, however, let us realize their great temptations. To the average employer, especially in the newer areas of white settlement where white labor is scarce and dictatorial, what could be more enticing than the vision of a boundless supply of cheap and eager colored labor?
Consider this Californian appraisement of the Chinese coolie: “The Chinese coolie is the ideal industrial machine, the perfect human ox. He will transform less food into more work, with less administrative friction, than any other creature. Even now, when the scarcity of Chinese labor and the consequent rise in wages have eliminated the question of cheapness, the Chinese have still the advantage over all other servile labor in convenience and efficiency. They are patient, docile, industrious, and above all ‘honest’ in the business sense that they keep their contracts. Also, they cost nothing but money. Any other sort of labor costs human effort and worry, in addition to the money. But Chinese labor can be bought like any other commodity, at so much a dozen or a hundred. The Chinese contractor delivers the agreed number of men, at the agreed time and place, for the agreed price, and if any one should drop out he finds another in his place. The men board and lodge themselves, and when the work is done they disappear from the employer’s ken until again needed. The entire transaction consists in paying the Chinese contractor an agreed number of dollars for an agreed result. This elimination of the human element reduces the labor problem to something the employer can understand. The Chinese labor-machine, from his standpoint, is perfect.”[167]
What is true of the Chinese is true to a somewhat lesser extent of all “coolie” labor. Hence, once introduced into a white country, it becomes immensely popular—among employers. How it was working out in South Africa, before the exclusion acts there, is clearly explained in the following lines: “The experience of South Africa is that when once Asiatic labor is admitted, the tendency is for it to grow. One manufacturer secures it and is able to cut prices to such an extent that the other manufacturers are forced either to employ Asiatics also or to reduce white wages to the Asiatic level. Oriental labor is something which does not stand still. The taste for it grows. A party springs up financially interested in increasing it. In Natal to-day the suggestion that Indian labor should no longer be imported is met by an outcry from the planters, the farmers, and landowners, and a certain number of manufacturers, that industries and agriculture will be ruined. So the coolie ships continue to arrive at Durban, and Natal becomes more and more a land of black and brown people and less a land of white people. Instead of becoming a Canada or New Zealand, it is becoming a Trinidad or Cuba. Instead of white settlers, there are brown settlers.... The working-class white population has to go, as it is going in Natal. The country becomes a country of white landlords and supervisors controlling a horde of Asiatics. It does not produce a nation or a free people. It becomes what in the old days of English colonization was called a ‘plantation.’”[168]
All this gives a clearer idea of the difficulties involved in a successful guarding of the gates. But it also confirms the conviction that the gates must be strictly guarded. If anything further were needed to reinforce that conviction it should be the present state of those white outposts where the gates have been left ajar.
Hawaii is a good example. This mid-Pacific archipelago was brought under white control by masterful American Nordics, who established Anglo-Saxon institutions and taught the natives the rudiments of Anglo-Saxon civilization. The native Hawaiians, like the other Polynesian races, could not stand the pressure of white civilization, and withered away. But the white oligarchy which controlled the islands determined to turn their marvellous fertility to immediate profit. Labor was imported from the ends of the earth, the sole test being working ability without regard to race or color. There followed a great influx of Asiatic labor—at first Chinese until annexation to the United States brought Hawaii under our Chinese exclusion laws; later on Filipinos, Koreans, and, above all, Japanese.
The results are highly instructive. These Asiatics arrived as agricultural laborers to work on the plantations. But they did not stay there. Saving their wages, they pushed vigorously into all the middle walks of life. The Hawaiian fisherman and the American artisan or shopkeeper were alike ousted by ruthless undercutting. To-day the American mechanic, the American storekeeper, the American farmer, even the American contractor, is a rare bird indeed, while Japanese corporations are buying up the finest plantations and growing the finest pineapples and sugar. Fully half the population of the islands is Japanese, while the Americans are being literally encysted as a small and dwindling aristocracy. In 1917 the births of the two races were: American, 295; Japanese, 5,000! Comment is superfluous.
Clear round the globe, the island of Mauritius, the half-way house between Asia and Africa, tells the same tale. Originally settled by Europeans, mostly French, Mauritius imported negroes from Africa to work its rich soil. This at once made impossible the existence of a white laboring class, though the upper, middle, and artisan classes remained unaffected by the economically backward blacks. A hundred years ago one-third of the population were whites. But after the abolition of slavery the negroes quit work, and Asiatics were imported to take their place. The upshot was that the whites were presently swamped beneath the Asiatic tide—here mostly Hindus. To-day the Hindus alone form more than two-thirds of the whole population, the whites numbering less than one-tenth. Indeed, the very outward aspect of the island is changing. The old French landmarks are going, and the fabled land of “Paul and Virginia” is becoming a bit of Hindustan, with a Chinese fringe. Even Port Louis, the capital town, has mostly passed from white to Indian or Chinese hands.
Now what do these two world-sundered cases mean? They mean, as an English writer justly remarks, “that under the British flag Mauritius has become an outpost of Asia, just as Hawaii is another such and under the Stars and Stripes.”[169] And, of course, there is Natal, already mentioned, which, at the moment when the recent South African Exclusion Act stayed the Hindu tide, had not only been partially transformed into an Asiatic land, but was fast becoming a centre of Asiatic radiation all over South Africa.
With such grim warnings before their eyes, it is not strange that the lusty young Anglo-Saxon communities bordering the Pacific—Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, and our own “coast”—have one and all set their faces like flint against the Oriental and have emblazoned across their portals the legend: “All White.” Nothing is more striking than the instinctive and instantaneous solidarity which binds together Australians and Afrikanders, Californians and Canadians, into a “sacred union” at the mere whisper of Asiatic immigration.
Everywhere the slogan is the same. “The ‘White Australia’ idea,” cries an antipodean writer, “is not a political theory. It is a gospel. It counts for more than religion; for more than flag, because the flag waves over all kinds of races; for more than the empire, for the empire is mostly black, or brown or yellow; is largely heathen, largely polygamous, partly cannibal. In fact, the White Australia doctrine is based on the necessity for choosing between national existence and national suicide.”[170] “White Australia!” writes another Australian in similar vein. “Australians of all classes and political affiliations regard the policy much as Americans regard the Constitution. It is their most articulate article of faith. The reason is not far to seek.... Australian civilization is little more than a partial fringe round the continental coastline of 12,210 miles. The coast and its hinterlands are settled and developed, although not completely for the entire circumference; in the centre of the country lie the apparently illimitable wastes of the Never-Never Land, occupied entirely by scrub, snakes, sand, and blackfellows. The almost manless regions of the island-continent are a terrible menace. It is impossible to police at all adequately such an enormous area. And the peoples of Asia, beating at the bars that confine them, rousing at last from their age-long slumber, are chafing at the restraints imposed upon their free entry into and settlement of such uninhabited, undeveloped lands.”[171]