THE CHINESE IN AMERICA.

Westport Times, Volume VI, Issue 920, 30 January 1872, Page 3

THE CHINESE IN AMERICA.

(From the " Philadelphia Ledger.")

The census returns show that the number of persons of Chinese birth in the United States a year ago was 61,196. As the aggregate of the population of the country at the same time was 38,549,987, we find that 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 thing, and it has not 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 greet a number as overflowing China has done up to the present time. These wellknown facts, now confirmed by official returns, show how absurd is the fear that " American labour," as it is called —mainly naturalized American labour —is to lose its dignity and its proper compensation because one-sixtieth of 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, they 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 invasion, from these figures furnished by the census, would seem to have little to fear.