The Chinese Question.

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3090, 13 January 1879, Page 2

The Chinese Question.

A. correspondent writes to the Australasian as follows :— Sir,—Of those who hare labored and written for the good of mankind, the writings of none hare been less understood and more decried than those of Malthas. It is now some 80 years ago since his first work appeared, the purport of which waa to show that the natural tendenoy of

the law of population was that human beings increased faster than the supply of food necessary to maintain them, consequently that, as rational beings, we were bound to put some check to that increase; to use, as he terms it, " moral restraint" if we wished to avert th« certain results, namely, poverty and misery. This doctrine was pooh-poohed, and held up to ecorn as the dream of a visionary; more* over, that it encouraged vice and immorality, and Malthua has been consigned to obscurity. But, Sir, truth will not be crushed out, and the despised doctrine will yet again see the light, and a justification of all that he has written is afforded in that very question which, now agitates the public mind, Chinese labour. To escape death by famine the swarming millions of China are ready to go anywhere and everywhere on the face of the habitable globe. They have long reached their maximum of population, and but for infanticide, the ravages of famine, and emigration, would have been reduced to cannibalism long ago ; in fact, during the late famine in China human flesh was sold in public until the mandarins found it out and executed the ve&dori. Well, Sir, what is true of China will in time be the same with other nations, the only difference being that we, the European race, have but lately emerged from barbarism, while the Chinese have been comparatively civilized for. thousands of years. We have room at present for more people, but naturally and properly object to receive an inferior race in any numbers. Let these people work but the' cure at home, and cease to increase the numbers of their species. In a thousand years, or less, the field of emigration will be exhausted, and then other nation! must perforce work out the same problem. France, in its own way, has already done it. Malthus had the same object in view, only the means were different.—Yours, &c, W.B.