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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VII, Issue 31, 5 February 1872, Page 2

The Chinese in America, — The Philadelphia Ledger says : — " The census returns show that the number of persona of Chinese birth in the United States a year ago was 61,195. As the aggregate of the population of the country at the same time was 38,549,987, we find tbat China has contributed one in 610 to our population, or less than one-sixth of one per cent. This is the terrible Chinese problem which has terrified so many of the "working men," and their leaders. Chinese immigration is not a new thiDg, and it has cot lately received any extraordinary impulse. Out of the " barbarous millions " of Asia we have as yet among us less than seventy thousand. Exhausted Ireland swelled the census figure the year preceding the census by nearly. as great a number as overflowing China has done up to the present time. These wellknown facts, now confirmed by official returns, show bow absurd is the fear that " American labor," as it is called' — mainly naturalised American labor— is to loße its dignity and its proper compensation because one-sixtieth oi the accessions from abroad in the last seventeen years have come from Asia rather than Europe. If every person of all ages and both sexes of Chinese birth now in the United States were set at work making boots and shoes, the;, could not. replace numerically the persons now employed in that, industry in Massachusetts. The miners in the coal regions, nor even the: house servants in the cities, whose pursuits have been threatened by a Celestial in vasion, from these figures furnished, by the : census, would seem to have little to fear.