THE Evening Star. PUBLISHED DAILY AT FOUR O'CLOCK P.M. Resurrexi. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1879.

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3115, 11 February 1879, Page 2

THE Evening Star. PUBLISHED DAILY AT FOUR O'CLOCK P.M. Resurrexi. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1879.

In their contribution to the literature of the day on " the Chinese question," 'Messrs Kong Meng and Co. attempt a reply to some of the arguments used against Chinese immigration. They urge, for instance, in answer to one objection that they never bring their females with them, as a reason, that early outrage on Chinamen perpetrated at the Bucldand, on the Ovens. Now this seems a very lame excuse—in fact, no excuse at all, for whatever indignities were put upon Chinamen in the early days of the goldfields, of late years the law has extended its protection to them, even though their presence in numbers was obnoxious to a majority of the people. Moreover,-this objection against Chinamen of invajligg aT -WWllr^Jiaacjco^ijD^njedJj^ 4Jieirwomen, seems to apply to all British Colonies, and the States of America where they have been domiciled; and it is well known to those who know the various journalistic and other phases of the question in San Francisco, that the presence of a limited number of Chinese females haa only tended to aggravate the evil of Chinese immigration. Numerous commissions and enquiries have elicited the fact that very few Chinamen in the Colonies or California live with their own countrywomen in a virtuous state, but that the latter are brought over to be mere slaves to minister to the lusts of depraved men. Our authors next notice another cause of prejudice against Chinamen, that they will bring down the rate of wages. No doubt they have already done so ; and the suggestion that Chinamen will in time " rise to the European level " in the matter of artificial wants, and approximate their habits and mode of life to those, of their neighbors, we regard as unlikely of realisation. The experience of the past twenty years in the Colonies conduces to the conclusi n that Chinese immigration or settlement to any great extent is undesirable. The experience of Melbourne and Ballarat municipal and police authorities is that the Chinese gambling practices and allurements have been the destruction of hundreds of young men and boys, and that gambling is still carried on in defiance of all attempts to put it down. Their systematic corruption of young girls scarcely emerged from childhood is an evil that the police courts of Melbourne and Ballarat are continually furnishing fresh evidence of. The manufacture and sale of spurious gold, the robbery of sluice boies and hen roosts, are minor offences which Chinamen seem peculiarly adept in, and many other

indictments might be made out against the Mongolians, on which Kong Meng and his coauthors have not offered either explanation or extenuation. In order to give oar readers an idea of the question of right, which the Chinese contend they possess under Treaties, to spread themselves over the Colonies, we give the concluding paragraphs of their pamphlet :—

This, then, is the position of the Chinese in Australia, relatively to British colonists. By a treaty forced upon his Imperial Majesty, our august master, jour nation compelled him,to throw open the gates of his empire to the people of Western Europe. In return you bound yourself to reciprocity. The freedom to come and go, to trade and settle, which you insisted upon claiming for yourselves, you alsb v accorded to the subjects of his Imperial Majesty. He has fulfilled the first part, of the compact, and the trade of Great Britain with China has trebled during the last fourteen years, to say nothing of the indirect commerce transacted with' that country via Singapore and Hong Kong. Well, our countrymen begin to emigrate to these colonies, and to seek employment' on board of Australian vessels, in the fullest confidence that the second portion of the compact will be carried out, and they are astounded to find that its fulfilment is resisted by the subjects of Her Majesty Queen Victoria in Australia, and that we are routed and hunted down as if we were so many wild beasts. Chinamen are t told — "You must not work in Australian ships or in Australian factories; you must not earn a livelihood by hawking or by handicrafts in these colonies. You must leave off cultivating gardens, and fabricating furniture, and following the industrial employments you have adopted ; and you must either starve, beg, steal, or vanish." In the name of heaven, we ask, where is your justice P Where your religion P Where your morality ? Where your sense of right and wrong P Where your enlightenment? Where your love of liberty? Where your respect for international law P Which are the "pagans"—you or we? And what has become of those sublime and lofty sentiments of human brotherhood and cosmopolitan friendship and sympathy which are so often on your lips, and are proclaimed so wisely from pulpit, press, and platform ?

Tsze-Kung, one of the disciples of Confucius, asked the latter on a certain occasion, " Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life ? " The master answered, " Is not reciprocity such a word," meaning thereby what was sought by your own Great Teacher. " All things whatsoever ye would that men should do, do you even so to them." Upon this reciprocity we take our stand. If you renounce it; if you say, "might is right, and treaties are not worth the parchment they are written on ; " if you assert that this large and comparatively unoccupied portion of the earth's surface is to *be fenced off from a rice of people who are geographically so near to it, r and who are so well adapted by nature and temperament for the cultivation of extensive regions of it, from which Europeans will gradually wither away,; if,you substitute, arbitrary violence, hatred, and jealousy, for justice, legality, and right; it may be that you will succeed in carrying your point; it may be that a great wrong will be accomplished by the exercise of sheer force, and the weight of superior numbers; but your reputation among tbS-nstions of the■earth*"'will be irretrievably injured and debased, and the flag of which you are so justly proud will be no longer the standard of freedom and the hope of the'oppressed, but it will be associated with deeds of falsehood and treachery, with broken faith, with a violated treaty, with the pitiful triumph of strength over weakness, of European guile and selfishness over Asiatic sincerity and confidence, and with conduct which no sophistry can reconcile with the precepts of youi: religion, with the canons of your morality, with the spirit of your laws, with the policy of your wisest statesmen, with the voice of conscience, and with the character and traditions of the people of Great Britain.