The Daily News TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 1904. "WHITE AUSTRALIA."

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLVI, Issue 285, 6 December 1904, Page 2

The Daily News TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 1904. "WHITE AUSTRALIA."

Among the earliest laws enacteO by the first Parliament of the Commonwealth was a measure for the complete control of coloured immigration. Though there have since arisen other questions on which the peoples of the several States have seen cause to ■differ widely, there has been no weakening of the general determination to maintain such laws as will secure to posterity the possession of a White Australia. The intelligent and patriotic citizen of the Commoawealth does not want the cheap Asiatic, either as a competitor or as an employer, and he loathes the very thought of fym as a family connection. He knows that without strict defensive measures his country, founded, settled, and civilised by his parents and himself, must soon become flooded with the scum of the Levant and the dregs of the Eastern seas. He knows that in any unregulated competition 'between himself and the human beast of burden from Hongkong he and his -wife and children must inevitably fall to the social and domestic level of Mr and Mrs Kum Soon ami offspring. He knows that in the squalid state of life, in which it would please certain persons promptly to place him. his sons and daughters would grow up', in da/ily association with the progeny of "the Indian and the Syrian, and that in his disreputable old age he, the once honest and respectable white Australian, would find himself the informal father-in-law of Ghulam Hussein, and the grandfather of" Umecren Bcbe. He knows that his country, Instead of giving birth to a nation lit to march in line with the Canadian and Xew Zcalander, must become populated by communities of hopeless mongrels, in which the white d,.menl of Smith and .Jones has become swamped beyond recognition by the muddy deluge of Mumi Swahiui, Yakoob Ben Mahmond, and Lo Chow.

The Australian perceives, in short, all the certain evils of unrestricted coloured competition, and racial intermixture, and being, on the average, an enlightened, though somewhat over-trustful, white man, he hopes •to obviate these evils by timely protective measures. It was for these reasons that one of his earliest mandates to his Federal representatives was to enact such a law for the exclusion of coloured aliens as would ensure for himself and his posterity a social condition in which the cheap and nasty races of mankind have no place. But unfortunately no law is any better than its administratidh, and the over-trustful Australian did not make his law hard and fast enough to withstand the da-rigors arising from the hostility of a mcan-white-and-cheap-niggcr Government. The triangular division of parties in the present House of Representatives has kept the Reid Ministry in place long enough to permit of great mischief in the way of undoing the work of Australia's first Parliament. Quite recently it was announced that the Reid Ministry had presumed to modify the operation of the Asiatics Expulsion Act in such a degree as to permit of the free ingress of "tourists and students," and presumably of all other persons whose principles aro not too strict to prevent them from taking advantage of Mr Reid's complaisant suspension of the law by entering, under these indefinite classifications.

More lately, as the cable has informed us, Mr Bruce Smith, a wellknown New South Wales representative of the free trade and cheap labour gang, has given notice of a motion to remove all such restrictions as differentiate between .Japanese and Europeans. Notwithstanding the prompt approval of the Jingo Daily Mail of London, there is little cause to fear that this flag-i----tious proposal to thwart the deliberate policy of the Australian people will meet witn anything less than contemptuous rejection. lint that any member should have dared thus to flout public opinion shows the sad condition to which representative Government may be reduced by the system of triangular parties. Every free country, on account of its very freedom, may have the misfortune to harbour enemies within its gates, but it is a lamentable mischance which permits to such perspns the possibility of grasping even temporarily the reins of national government. Australia is under no obligation to Japan which should move its Parliament specially to abrogate the law in favour of people from that country. It. is already matter of Australian experience that Japanese are more undesirable citizens than even Chinese. Also, as every Eastern trader knows, their commercial principles are a byword for all that is tricky and dishonourable, while, as is equally well known, the Chinese trader, though a keen and cunning bargainer and evader of law, is* noted for a code of honour which make his word of promise or agreement as reliable as any written bond. As a resident in the Commonwealth the Japanese man is known to Australians as of a more turbulent disposition thtmeven tire Filipino or the Malay. In Western Australia be has ,l»een notorious for years as the proprietor of bagnios in which he caters to the hist of European and Asiatic alike by providing women of his own race for all who approach him with the wages of vice, To the creditor the too diligent and cheap Chinese it can safely lie said that in Australia they are not known to descend to this hideous depth of degradation. The Chinaman is often immoral, but

his viciousness takes ihe form ot working for and supporting fallen females rather lhau of shamelessly fattening on Ihe price of the virtue of his own country-women. Commercially, Australia owes nothing 10 Japan, tlw gain on live balance of trade being wholly on Ihe other side. Doubtless a shipping (inn or two. such as that of which Mr llruce Smith is a member, may have secured some profitable Japanese contracts, but Australia on the whole buys from Japan immensely more than that country takes in return. There is no argument for the admission of Japanese; which dees not apply with equal force to tin; ad-mis-J sion of Chinese and Afghans, and Australia has long since become convinced that the presence of any of them is a huge evil. The argument of the racial equality of men, which is so oil en heard from i pseudo - philanthropists and preachers of religion, is wholly insincere. There is no white man with any pride of race who personally considers the man of colour as his social equal, or who would accept with equanimity the proposal of a Chinese or Japanese for the hand of his daughter or sister. It is indeed only in the meanest slums of large cities that, we find now a'nd! then a creature who tolerates the second marriage of his mother to Jackson 1\ Johnson of the woolly head, op to the Asiatic whom the Australian larrikin classes genericully as "a chutney bloke." We may go even further, and say that though the charms of the geisha may appear very realistic in romance, or comic opera, or tales of travel, we can scarcely conceive of the white man who, with offspring in view, would deliberately ally himself with ever, one of the fairest "daughters of Old Japan." These things being so, it is obviously the merest casuistry to use the argument of equality on behalf of the Asiatic. Nature knows and teaches better, and has endowed most white men with an instinctive antipathy to personal miscegenation. Where social circumstances have been such as to give cause for the mixing of European and lower bloods, and the production of Mulatto or Eurasian communities, the warnings of instinct are justified by results. It is a commonplace of anthropology to say that the half-breed between •diverse races is a moral degenerate —a being, who ia the common phrase,has the vices of both races and the virtues of neither.

It is then, because the common Intelligence of the Australian people teaches them that there is nothing but social and moral evil to be anticipated from the free admission of the coloured races that the vast majority of them are determined to keep their country for themselves and their descendants, and to maintain the high level of industrial, social, and moral welfare that is embodied in the phrase, a white Australia. With such an ideal, and tuch a national aim in view, the Commonweafth has rightly decided that its continent, in all its vastness, has no room for the Asiatic. It wishes to avoid the evils of industrial and social degradation, of miscegenation, and the future certainty of racial hostility which history has taught it to look for wherever the European meets the man of colour in I the struggle for existence. We In New Zealand, while free from much of the coloured curse which has already turned parts of Australia into moral plague centres, ure equally interested with our brethren of the Commonwealth in the maintenance of White principles. In the national struggle for existence no white people can afford to weight itself with theoretical sentimentalism about equalities of right and race which do not exist, and which every while man with a white heart knows in his inner mind can never be made to exist.

Whatever the future of the islands of Australia may be it is incumbent upon every patriotic white citizen to look to it that no act of his shall 1)0 antagonistic to the supremacy of his own race. Tho arguments of the advocate of cheap labour, and the claptrap of the preacher of social equality are alike the words' of an enemy to the white man, and should be unmistakably treated with the contumely which is their desert. Men like Mr Bruce Smith are the foes not only of the state whose downfall they would compass, but of every interest of European progress and civilisation. For the service of their own selfish ends they would reduce the working man of their own race to tine level of an Asiatic coolie, and complacently see his wife and children compelled to herd with the leprous Chinese and tho Yokohama courtesan. If the electors of Australia are true to their own interests the time cannot be long before the Reid Government with its crowd of unprincipled self-seekers and sycophantic grovellers before the shrine of Shinto are consigned to the obscurity from which ' they should never have been allowed to emerge. That their downfall may bo. early and permanent must be the fervent hope of every friend of White Australia.