This exclusiveness has left a continent with barely the fringe of it scratched. To people like the Japanese, Chinese and Indians, this must indeed seem the height of selfishness. True, that sparse as her population is, Australia has done more to better the condition of her people than has Japan or China; and there is the rub. That mere excessive breeding gives a nation a right to invade other lands is a principle that no decent-minded man could tolerate for a moment. Only people to whom woman is merely a breeding-machine would advance such an argument. And in the chapter on Japan and the Far East I shall elucidate the basic facts in that contention for the elimination of a White-Australia policy.
From the Australian point of view, though admitting that hardships are bound to result, admitting that ethically discrimination is unprogressive, the country is faced by the danger of sheer numbers. Idealistically the Australian policy is wrong. Individually, those of us who know the Japanese and the Chinese would just as soon live next door to them as to any other human beings. But as long as numbers are the racial ideal of the East, there is no solution that would not undermine quality if quality did not defend itself against quantity. I am ready to admit that there are many Australians who are as inferior to the Chinese as the coolie is to us. But the Australasian has one virtue: he does not breed like the Oriental.
The problem of assimilation and Australianization is intricate and sometimes extremely unjust. There is the case of the young Chinese boy born and brought up in Port Darwin, North Australia. In every way he is an Australian citizen. To further his education and westernization, he came to America to study at Harvard, and here fell in love with a Chinese student born in Boston. Now, she is an American citizen. They are to be married. He has every reason for wishing to return to Port Darwin with his wife. But, says the Australian Immigration Law, you can't come in because you're a Chinese. "But I'm an American Citizen, and the wife of an Australian," she argues. "That doesn't matter. We exclude Indians, who are British subjects, from entering Australia, and we intend to exclude you. Australia is the only country in the world in which the white race is still free to expand, and we intend to keep it free for them." "What is America going to do about it?" I asked my informer. "What can she do? The only thing she could do would be to come to a clash of arms with us, and we intend to let the Chinese do their own fighting if they want to. We won't let Japanese who are American-born citizens enter Australia; we may seem a bit piggish about it, but we intend to hold to our own nevertheless." This question was up for the British Minister to decide upon, but at the time of writing no decision has yet been arrived at.
That injustice such as the above is bound to result is obvious. But for generations to come the onus rests on the Orientals, and on those white men who would profit by either cheap or untiring laborers whose minds ask for nothing, and whose bodies are content with little.
Though Australia's contribution to the intellectual welfare of the world has as yet been slim, the advance in political and economic thought has been exceedingly worth while. The freedom of the individual to go his way in life, to develop the best that is in him, the standard of general welfare and the quality of life as a whole so far excels the average of Oriental social life that Australasia is justified in trying to prevent the dilution of its concentrated comfort. We all know and admit that both China and Japan have civilizations, intellectual and artistic, the like of which might well be emulated in the West. But beneath it all is the dreadful waste of human life for which China and Japan must give answer before demanding of the West certain physical and material advantages which we have.
CHAPTER XIX
JAPAN AND ASIA
When I completed the final section of my book "Japan: Real and Imaginary," last year, and sent it to the publisher, I was not a little worried lest the movement of events in the Far East proceed so rapidly that the cart upon which I was riding slip from under me and leave me to rejoin the earth as best I could. So fast did things run that I thought surely there would be a revolution in Japan, or at least universal manhood suffrage, and that without doubt Japan would withdraw from Shantung. I am afraid I shall have to confess that the wish was father to the thought. So far nothing has happened in that intricate island empire seriously to affect any of the generalizations in that book. Nor have any criticisms from my Japanese friends come forward so that I might now be able to alter my position in any way.
However, enough has happened to make it necessary for me to extend and enlarge upon some of the phases of the Japanese situation as they now obtain. In my former book I handled Japan as an integer, avoiding implications. Here I shall attempt to show how the Japanese phase of the problem of the Pacific affects the three important elements round the Pacific,—America, Australasia, and Asia. Under that head I shall have to begin where I left off in "Japan: Real and Imaginary," with the question of emperor-worship and its natural offspring, Pan-Asianism and the so-called Monroe Doctrine of Asia; with the ingrowing phases of it, democracy in Japan, and the Open Door without; with Japan's new mandates and what she is doing with them; with the fortification of the Bonin Islands and the Pescadores.