Extracts.

Lyttelton Times, Volume VIII, Issue 496, 5 August 1857, Page 3

Extracts.

at Italian poet of the middle ages TheJF -I<p of the uninitiated perhaps We that we allude to Dantebad ■ the thirteenth century wrote one of lfb° IB t famous poems in the world, in lbe- The describes as a reality, in the "^5 «f simplest language, his journey b h the Hell, the Purgatory, and the Kn of that day; precisely such a poem H own glorious tinker, John Bunyan, as. ?" lnve written, had he had the music pightndv , intellectual cultiinhiS: f the others-well, this Dante, after f°ll you, with magic-lantern, nightmare • mess all the scenes in seven concen- • Uhastns'of Hell-descending one within trie thel . Hke the steps of a circus—sees I rrible incident, which we will give m '■ nrn words, or rather those of his admiS£tiSato;,Dr.J.A.Carlyle.:- ■ „I had turned myself downwards; but the • • „ pvps could not reach the bottom for the M P ?s Wherefore I: 'Master' see thou get !£ other boundary and let us dismount the l for as I hear from hence and do not Wand' so I see down and distinguish maeisuui » # #. # . << We went down by the bridge, by the head riiPtt it ioins with the eighth bank,; and then £ chasm was manifest to me. And I saw Sun it a fearful throng of serpents, and of so tnnfe a look that even now the recollection S? my Wood. •■•'• Amid this cruel ndmost dismal swarm were people running, Sand terrified. *;* • If thou ar now ) reader, slow to credit what I have to tell, it fill be no wonder; for I, who saw it, scarce How it to myself. Whilst I kept gazing on hem lo! a serpent with, six feet darts up in ront'of one, and fastens itself all upon him. Vith its middle feet it clasped its. belly; with he anterior it seized his arms ; then fixed its eetli in both Ms cheeks. The hinder feet it tretched along his thighs, and put its tail beiveen the two and bent it upwards on his loins leliind. Ivy was never so rooted to a tree, as ound the other's limbs the hideous' monster ntwined its own. Then they stuck together as hey had been of heated wax, and mingled their olours; neither the one nor the other now eemed what it was at first; as up, before the lame, on paper goes a brown colour, which is lot yet black, and the white dies away. The wo spirits looked on, end each cried, ' 0 me, Lgnello! how thou changest! Lo! Thou art Iready neither two nor one !' The two heads iad now become one, when two shapes appeared ous mixed in one face, where both were lost, 'wo avms were made of the four (upper limbs). !lie thighs, with the legs, &c, became such nembers as were never seen. The former shape ras all extinct in them; both and neither the ierverse image seemed; and such it went away nth languid step."

The odious vision of the grim poet may )e only an illustration—far from inapt or >verdone—of the fate that may possibly wait some of Australian colonies—nay, tfew Zealand itself, and Nelson as likely as »ny of its settlements.

' The immigration of the Chinese to Melbourne has already excited the alarm of some of the public, as we see by their newspapers. They appear to be coming Sown in swarms. Ten thousand, we hear, arrived in less than three months; at the rate of more than forty thousand a-year. The gold, of course, is the attraction. ■There appears to be nothing to hinder their coming in still increasing swarms. The population of China, according to all accounts, is between three hundred, and 'tree hundred and fifty millions ; more than fhe population of all Europe. Millions of hem have for ages been hard pressed for ■«c means of subsistence, and must be 'Ming, if they can get the opportunity, to migrate. "How many more of you are ttming ?" some of them were asked. " Oh, Wthe rest of us!" is reported to have been neanswer; of course a joking one, but efficiently indicative of the prevalent feeing- Our readers know how the myriads of Jeir lower classes feed on all kinds of filth ."ey can get their teeth into—dogs, rats, »uppies, stinking fish, &c, the result of :°wse of insufficient means of subsistence. ; singular 'Mongolians are certainly ' loWer type of the human race than the -aucasmns, among whom we Anglo-Saxons yjjter ourselves we hold no mean place. j y bached a certain point of civilization J e thousand or thousands of years ago, na at that they have stopped, with h if'i! nt^ an of advancing one "c« beyond it. They are exceedingly and ,™terately sensual and depraved, in moral matters. They have all the and immovable satisfaction of their :^P nonty engendered by the consciousness ac lVl i, Zat j On j (i gQme externa i particulars, if'ml a tllousand years before the people iidM t Euro Pc *AVere heard of even as bino ns" Christianity is a modern ions COtJj paved witn their antique superstij e •' . as an innovation they no doubt iiiv Se lt:' yen the Jesuits never made >ecul? toffrS 8 iv convertinS them. Their ;ar Paganism— not without some

merits, however, to do them and it justice— they will probably adhere to as long as they exist as a people,

And here we may remark upon a curious fact for the consideration of the supporters of denominational or sectarian education. The Chinese in Melbourne, where that system prevails, ar3 said to have appiied to Government for their share of the public funds appropriated to that object. And of course, if there is any consistency in the scheme, they are fully entitled to it. So that the public funds of Victoria may go, among other things, to the support of the religion, of the miraculously-born god-man Fo, and the temples of his subordinate/ossa? or gods. They are said to have established already private chapels, at all events, wherein those funny idols or josses are duly installed and worshipped.

There are above sixty thousand of these descendents of the the old Tartars—themselves, by the way, called by the old Greeks after Tartarus, their hell, from their supposed diabolical aspect—already settled in Victoria. And they have not brought above six women with them. They are accused of all sorts of horrible and .unutterable crimes, of which dark hints are given in allusions to unpublished police reports; which indeed are known to be exceedingly prevalent even in their own country, and which fthe habits of three thousand years have probably rendered inveterate and ingrained in their character, and impossible to be worn or worked out of it. so common in their native country that infants' bodies may sometimes be seen floating unnoticed in standing pools, they have not yet introduced for the obvious reason just given.

Now these are the creatures who threaten to seize, as it were, upon some of o,ur Australian communities, to incorporate and amalgamate themselves therewith ; eventually, and if the mischief be not put a stop to, to alter their whole character, and form a horrible hybrid between the Caucasian and Mongolian race—' neither two nor properly one'—a perverse and loathsome monster, crawling along with languid step —as hideous as that combination of the sixfooted serpent and the lost sinner conjured up by the saturnine imagination of Dante,

How to put a stop to this amalgamation ? How to shake off this monster which has so suddenly—rapidly as the brown colour running up before the flame on the paperseized hold of the Melbourne community. That is the question with many of them.

Mere fiscal regulations impeding the traffic of the passenger vessels that bring them across the sea—high or prohibitory duties on opium which is almost a necessary of life with the Chinese —it is not probable that any such measures will be sufficiently effectual. Any laws that cunning can evade, they will evade, being most expert smugglers and cheats in every way that low ingenuity can invent or conceive. No such milk-and-water measures as passing mere tax-imposing statutes, especially such statutes as colonial free legislatures can pass, will eradicate the nuisance.

It appears to us that this is pre-eminently a matter for the Imperial Government to deal with. An Act of Parliament should prohibit this immigration altogether, and orders should be sent to the naval commanders at all the stations peremptorily to stop it by physical force. If that be not sufficient," steam cruisers should be specially despatched for the purpose, and ;kept constantly on the look out in the Chinese and Australian seas.

It is one of the highest duties, this, of the Government of England. To keep the Australian colonies for their own people and their own race; to preserve that race from deterioration and the creepingl contamination of utterly alien and inferior hordes of a different type of human beings—to establish and spread through the waste spaces of the world Anglo-Saxon freedom, and let ud hope Anglo-Saxon virtues and energies —this assuredly is one of the highest duties of England that can be conceived, if any can be conceived at all. Her crusade against the Negro-slave-trade —well meant, no doubt—was but a questionable duty compared with this; a duty that has often been questioned; and to the questionable character of which it is probably owing that she carried on that crusade in such a dribbling and undecided style as almost to have increased the horrors her humanity wished to prevent. But this odious emigration may be infinitely worse and more detrimental to the human race than the negro one, and is the special concern of England herself.

That it is her interest to interfere seems equally obvious. The Australian colonies are what would have been called in the cant phrase of old more monarchical days, the " brightest jewels in the crown of England." In these days they may be styled

as among the corner stones of her commercial superiority—among the most steadfast pillars of her future, prosperity. The great trade of England, that which gave her wealth enough to resist Europe in arms, and overthrow Napoleon, was and is her cotton trade. But for long years after Napoleon's time her cotton exports did not reach more than seventeen millions of pounds' sterling in value yearly. The gold alone, without mentioning even wool, from Australia, all which is probably exchanged against English manufactures, amounts to fourteen millions a year. There is then another trade for her equal to the cotton trade, that helped so considerably to make her so great. Is it not worth their while, then, to prevent even the possibility of such colonies becoming peopled by a foreign race, alien and inimical to her own ?

We think all the Australian colonies should send unanimous petitions from all quarters to the Imperial Parliament, to interfere and stifle this hideous immigration in its infancy, in the most decisive way by physical force ; to send armed cruisers to repress it whei'ever attempted, and to free their populations from the chance of a permanent infusion of and admixture with these low-browed and cunning-eyed Mon-' golians—certainly a sadder consummation, and on a more gigantic scale, than ever poet feigned for the everlasting punishment of individual guilt.