THE BURMESE LABOUR QUESTION
One aspect of the labour question in Burma does not seem to have attracted the attention it deserves. In spite of Mr Fielding Hall's optimism, the belief that the apathetic Burman is being shouldered out of his own country by more hard-working immigrants, especially natives of India, is a very prevalent one, not only among European observers, but even among some classes of the Burmese themselves. At present no Burman dares to raise a protest against the influx of labourers, who, if they do not utterly crush him in the course of the struggle for existence, may at least degrade him from the high level of comfort and social well-being in which he now lives. The day may come when the Burman will demand that this alien immigration be interdicted. If he does so, what will be the attitude of the Government? Probably anything but sympathetic. The White races of Australia, British Columbia and California object to the influx of Chinese and Japanese labourers for reasons practically identical with those that would actuate the Burman, and if their attitude is a justifiable one can it be argued that the Burmese attitude would not be equally so? The Burman would doubtless be told by the European, whose material interests in Burma depend on the unrestricted immigration of hard-working aliens, that his country cannot be allowed to go to waste; that if he, through his laziness, will not develop it to the utmost, some one else must be found who will develop it in his stead. But the Chinese and Japanese might if they were strong enough—and perhaps some day they will be strong enough—knock at the gates of Australia, Canada and the United States, and demand admission on precisely similar grounds. No one will deny that the scarcity and high price of labour in those countries have seriously retarded, and are still retarding, nearly every form of industrial and agricultural development; yet the Yellow races are excluded on the grounds that they would lower the White man's standard of living, and that they are in the habit of sending their earnings out of the country. I do not say the White man's attitude is unreasonable: but I do not see how, on our own principles, we could refuse to restrict the immigration of black aliens into Burma if the Burmese people—on grounds identical with those that actuate our own conduct in Canada and elsewhere—demanded that we should do so. Such action would no doubt be an artificial restriction of natural economic tendencies, and so might bring its own punishment in the long-run; but the same remark applies to the policy adopted in our own colonies.
We have recently become so much accustomed to hear of the antagonism and rivalry of interests between East and West—as if all Eastern countries represented one set of immutable ideals and all Western countries another—that we are apt to lose ourselves in a mist of generalities. The East has problems of its own to solve, some of which reproduce in a more restricted area the racial problems that are beginning at a late hour to agitate the minds of statesmen in Europe and America. The European speaks with half-hearted contempt (behind which lurks a secret dread) of a Yellow Peril: the Burman is disquieted by a no less threatening Black Peril that is already within his gates, and his gates still stand open with a dangerous hospitality.
NOTE 47 ([p. 384])
MILITARY QUALITIES OF ORIENTALS
The British officers who trained and led the recently-disbanded Chinese Regiment are known to have formed a high opinion of the personal courage of the Chinese as represented by the men of that regiment. When it is remembered that the very existence of the regiment as a unit in the British Army was an anomaly, and that at Tientsin and Peking the men fought as mercenaries against their own countrymen, the fact that they behaved well under fire is all the more noteworthy. It may be taken for granted that even the Japanese soldier, if ordered to charge an unruly mob of his own countrymen, would hardly show the brilliant daring that he displayed before Port Arthur.
When Europe was startled by the news of some of the great Japanese victories in Manchuria, an English newspaper made the somewhat hasty suggestion that the Japanese were "scientific fanatics," and the phrase was caught up and repeated with approbation by many. Why fanatics? Simply because the Japanese troops had behaved with such unheard-of heroism that Europe was unable to reconcile such conduct with its own ideas of what constituted bravery. What many Englishmen said, in effect, was this: "The conduct ordinarily shown by British troops in action is bravery; to go beyond this is fanaticism. The criterion of true courage is the average conduct of the average British soldier on the field of battle." The Japanese who with reckless gallantry gave their lives for emperor and country on the battle-fields of Liao-tung, and who considered it a disgrace to return home without a wound, were fanatics. Well, if so, it is a kind of fanaticism that every European Government would like to see spread among its own fighting-men when the day of battle comes.
NOTE 48 ([p. 388])
"THE YELLOW PERIL"
With some people the antipathy to the Oriental amounts to a positive horror, inexplicable even by themselves in ordinary language, and very often based on no personal experience. "I know not," said De Quincey, "what others share in my feelings on this point; but I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China, among Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery, I should go mad. The causes of my horror lie deep, and some of them must be common to others.... In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, by the barrier of utter abhorrence placed between myself and them, by counter-sympathies deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics, with vermin, with crocodiles or snakes." When we have made all allowances for the excited utterances of an opium-dreamer, these words indicate the existence of intensely strong feelings of racial antipathy, and there is no reason to regard De Quincey as the only European who has entertained such feelings. Does our subliminal consciousness retain dim ancestral memories of mighty struggles waged æons ago for the survival and supremacy of our own racial type? And does it harbour a vague prophetic dread of a more terrific warfare yet to come?