“The Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union—one of the most powerful in England—carried the protest into the Trades-Union Congress held at Birmingham. There, alarm was voiced at the steady increase in the number of Chinese hands on Britain’s ships. It was an increase, true, since the stress of war-times had begun to try Britain. But what England’s sons of the seven seas wanted to know was: when is ‘this Orientalizing’ of the British marine to stop?... The seamen’s unions were willing to do their bit for John Bull, but they wondered what was going to happen after the coming of peace. Would the Chinese continue to man John Bull’s ships?...
“Such is one manifestation of the decisive lifting of gates and barriers that has taken place since the white world went to war. To-day the Chinese—for decades finding a wall in every white man’s country—are numbered by the tens of thousands in the service of the Allies. They have made good. They are a war-factor.... All told, 200,000 Chinese are ‘carrying on’ in the war-zone, laboring behind the lines, in munition-works and factories, manning ships....
“What will happen when peace comes upon this red world—a world turned topsyturvy by the white man’s Great War, which has taken John Chinaman from Shantung, Chihli, and Kwangtung to that battle-ground in France?... That makes the drafting of China’s man-power one of the most supremely important events in the Great War. The family of nations is taking on a new meaning—John Chinaman overseas has a place in it. As Italian harvest-labor before the war went to and from Argentina for a few months’ work, so the Chinese have gone to Europe under contract and go home again. Perhaps this action will have a bearing on the solution of the Far West’s agricultural labor problem.
“Do not believe for a moment that the armies of Chinese in Europe will forget the lessons taught them in the West. When these sons of Han come home, the Great War will be found to have given birth to a new East.”[190]
So ends our survey. It has girdled the globe. And the lesson is always the same: Colored migration is a universal peril, menacing every part of the white world. Nowhere can the white man endure colored competition; everywhere “the East can underlive the West.” The grim truth of the matter is this: The whole white race is exposed, immediately or ultimately, to the possibility of social sterilization and final replacement or absorption by the teeming colored races.
What this unspeakable catastrophe would mean for the future of the planet, and how the peril may be averted, will form the subject of my concluding pages.
CHAPTER XII
THE CRISIS OF THE AGES