The Evening Star TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1874.

Evening Star, Issue 3644, 27 October 1874, Page 2

The Evening Star TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1874.

Curious social problems are in course of solution in various parts of the world which are taking form and feature from circumstances difficult, if not impossible, to control. Migrations of races have taken place ever since men multiplied on earth. Incited by one motive or another, want of food, want of a seaboard, plunder, lust of power, extension of territory, the strong for the time being have waged war upon the weak; and the victors have either absorbed the conquered nationality into their own, or enslaved or exterminated the earliest inhabitants of the country. But times are changed. It is not now the fashion to cut the throats of possible customers in order to increase trade. There is a consciousness that powerlooms can only be kept going by large populations ; that beef and mutton only sell well when there are plenty of months to be fed; and that it is a losing game to pay soldiers to make loot of the property of those who wanted to buy the product of the loom, or to kill them so that they cannot buy beef and mutton. These may be very matter-of-fact considerations: there is nothing of tragedy in them—none of those high-souled sentiments that one reads of in men whose chivalry leads them to prefer sentiment and poverty to comfort and abundance. Our own notion is there is uow-a-days a little more common sense than those heroes are generally represented to have been gifted with—in plain words, that we are a step further removed from those half savage conditions requisite to the evolution of the model heroes of old. We live in times when invasions by minorities are the fashion —inferiorities not only in number, but in art, science, and morals. Yet, advanced as British-speaking people are, and proud as they are of their position, the peaceful invasions of to-day, fraught with advantages, are made a bugbear of by a certain class of politicians, and terrify the very people who are benefited by their presence. A correspondent of, the ‘New Zealand Herald, 7 appalled at the sixty thousand Chinese now located in San Francisco, is filled with fearful forebodings as to the future, and draws the following dismal picture : There are sixty thousand Chinamen in this oity—nearly ono-third of the entire population, it is a physical, moral, and mental impossibility that this people can ever become amaiga mated with the Caucasian races. Except in the imitative arts they are a thousand years behind the citizens of this country, and they willnever overtake the distance. Morality, religion, cleanliness, are purely abstract terms with them, and the sole motive power in their nature, the desire to make money, is the principle they have in common with the “ Melicau man. Again, they have no interest at stake m the country, and are governed by a secret society, composed of wealthy men of their own race. There are ,six Chinese companies hero very wealthy and very powerful. Whatever social discipline is exercised is through the influence of these companies, who tax their humble brethren with as much regularity and as their models in this respect, the U.b. A. Customs officials. The most recent instance is the levying a tax of six dollars on every adult Chinaman, as a subsciiption to a fund for clean scraping his bones when dead, oteadily and surely the Chinese workman is driving the American to the wall. In every branch of trade they are ramifying to an extent scarceiy credible. Only the other day a swell Californian found himself in a state of intense disgust when he discovered that a pair of unfor which he had been measured by a.tiptop tailor, where the workmanship of a Chinaman. American capitalists are now compelled to employ Chinamen because the American laborer has been driven from the State by them. Nearly all the servant girls (excuse the bull) are Chinamen. They are cooks, housemaids, laundry maids, gardeners, anything and everything. As shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, cabinet-makers, tobacco spumes, and cigarmakers, they are a drug. Only from the heavier lines, such as blacksmiths, masons, and builders’ workshops, are they at present excluded. It is quite true that many of the railway lines now terminating in ’Frisco might not have been built had the promoters been obliged to employ American labor. It might have been better, however, to have allowed the lines to wait than to force them at the expense of the loss of probably 100,000 bona fide settlers. The Chinese import on their own account, through their own merchants, not only all the goods they sell, but all the food they consume and.all the clothing they wear. The bulk of their earnings find their way to China.

It never seems to occur to reasoners of this class to consider what would have been the condition of San Francisco had no Chinamen gone to dwell among them. They see so many Chinese working to obtain a living, not as men who are earning money to take it away, as is represented, but as those who, with their wives and families, intend settling in the country, the great objection urged against Chinese in Otago that they do not bring their wives with them—being removed. As for importing their own food, the nonsense is too apparent to be accepted. Remove those sixty thousand Chinese, send them away from American shores, and what would be the result on the commerce; agriculture, pastoral interest,

and manufactures of California? The complaint is really that the people are industrious, and their merchants importers. That may be true, but if they were in their own country there would be no demand for the European labor necessary to feed and clothe sixty thousand people : the sheep and cattle, and corn and wine—the growth of California—would, be almost valueless; the farmers and graziers, to say nothing of the thousands employed by. them, would have to .compete with distant markets, and would not find so much profitable labor j and San Francisco, in all probability, instead of having its two hundred thousand inhabitants, would have been a town in which fifty or sixty thousand, at the outside, found profitable employment. It would have had no railroads, no cheap communication with the interior i but little trade in the Pacific a sort of Sleepy Hollow—a town in a wilderness, begotten, like Ballarat, of gold, and dying because its mines were exhausted or not worth working. It appears that while the Chinese element is thus strong, thriving, and getting rich, larrikinism is becoming rampant. They do not call them larrikins in San Francisco, but “hoodlums.” Now “hoodlums ” being born of Christian parents are entitled to privileges unknown to the heathen Chinese. The heathen are under control, poor wretches ! they pay self-imposed taxes, and submit to the authority of men of their own race ; they are not independent enough to play hoodlum tricks and get “ into custody ” by nine hundred at a time. It is easy to find a reason for this. The correspondent of the ‘ New Zealand Herald 7 has found one.

As a first fruit of Chinese cheap labor, we have growing up here bands of hoodlums (Anglice, City Arabs), who are such because it is utterly impossible for them to find employment in the city, and they are unfitted, being city born, for agricultural life. Every avenue has been closed to them by the insatiable Mongol. B:m Quonten, the gaol, has over 900 of this hoodlum element in safe custody, yet the streets and by-ways are full ef them. Twothirds of the crime of San Francisco results from the fact that parents find it next to impossible to get their boys into anything like regular employment. Even, the business of sheep-herd-ing is in the hands of the inevitable “ John ” and the only thing left to the city-born boys 'is to become boot-blacks or hoodlums.

As we before suggested, why not send the sixty thousand orderly heathen away that the “ hoodlums 77 may have a chance of working ? Our only fear would be that they would have nothing to do but to migrate to some other large City where they could practise Christian “ hoodlutnism, 77 and then be subjected to the lash for it. Seriously, larrikinism must be dealt with in the infancy of its existence amongst us. It is a social disease that may be prevented, as is evident through its nonexistence among the Chinese. Admitting they are heathen, they are orderly, and it is worth inquiry how that order is secured. We claim for our civiiis t on far higher capabilities than that of the Chinese is equal to, but they have realised results that we are only dreaming about. They prevent the disease: we allow the seeds to spread and to germinate, and then punish the victims of our apathy, instead of seeking to eradicate the evil by reforming bad habits. One of our contemporaries would class the hoodlums with the poor and unfortunate, as if poverty were a crime, and men were justified in huddling the poor and criminal together. No doubt reasoners of that class consider Britons have a perfect right to live at Canton, Shanghai, Foo-ehow or anywhere else they like, and to make and send Home their profits by trading with the people and cutting out their own manufactures ; but woe to a Chinese who ventures to make money amongst us. He brings hoodlum ism at his heels ; and hoodlums, are criminal, and must be sent amongst children who are not hoodlums but only poor—and is it. not fittingthat the poor and thehoodlums shall bear a common brand? Our contemporary says “ Yes, 7 ’ for he would send “ hoodlums 77 to the industrial school. We say “No 77 —a reformatory is the fitting place for a “ hoodlum. 77