“Just so!” said Jim. “Sing,––all right! You beat it,––quick!”
The Chinaman went like a shot.
“And that is the kind of material––just as it stands, sometimes not half so civilised––that we allow into our country to over-run it by the thousands, allowing it to rub shoulders with us, to come into speaking distance with our women folks; their children––out of homes and hovels fathered by beings like that––sitting side by side with our own dear little mites at school.”
“Yes! but, after all, who brings them here?” commented the practical Jim.
“Who?”
“The farmers and the ranchers who are too mean to pay high enough for decent white labour; and the ordinary white labour itself who refuse to condescend to the more menial work on the farm. They have been the means of their coming here and––and now they are kicking themselves for their short-sighted stupidity, for John Chinaman is beating them to a frazzle at their own game and he is crowding us out of house and shelter like the proverbial camel did.
“John always was a better truck farmer anyway. He can make a fortune off a piece of land that a white man would starve on. He will outbid the white man every time in the matter of price when renting land for farming purposes and the land-owner doesn’t give a darn then whether he rents to white or yellow––so long as he gets the highest bidder’s money. The chink spends hardly anything on clothes, he lives in a hovel; eats rice, works seven days in the week, pays no taxes except a paltry Road Tax of something like four dollars a year––and generally manages to evade even that;––doesn’t contribute to Church, Charity or Social welfare, and sends every gold coin he can exchange for dollar bills 311 over to Hongkong where it is worth several times its value here. And––when all is said and done––he is still the best of three classes of Orientals our Province is being flooded with. There is the Jap, with his quiet, monkey-like imitation of white folks’ ways, yet all the time hanging on to his Japanese schools right in the midst of us; and the Hindoo who, as a class, prefers to herd like cattle in a barn and never will assimilate anything of this country but its roguery.”
“Well, it oughtn’t to be too late to work a remedy,” put in Eileen.
“It may not be too late––it is not too late––but it seems to be much too big a proposition for any of our own politicians to tackle single-handed; while our politicians in the East and Over-seas haven’t the faintest notion of the menace. You have to live among it and see just what we have seen to-day to get a glimpse of it.
“Why, even your own dad, Eileen, would be afraid to burn his political fingers with it,––and he understands it too.”