The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy Part 14

"The moral seems to be this: Eugenics among individuals is encouraging the propagation of the fit, and limiting or preventing the multiplication of the unfit. World-eugenics is doing precisely the same thing as to races considered as wholes. Immigration restriction is a species of segregation on a large scale, by which inferior stocks can be prevented from both diluting and supplanting good stocks. Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria by limiting the area and amount of their food-supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat, where its own multiplication in a limited area will, as with all organisms, eventually limit its numbers and therefore its influence. On the other hand, the superior races, more self-limiting than the others, with the benefits of more s.p.a.ce and nourishment will tend to still higher levels.

"This result is not merely a selfish benefit to the higher races, but a good to the world as a whole. The object is to produce the greatest number of those fittest not 'for survival' merely, but fittest for all purposes.

The lower types among men progress, so far as their racial inheritance allows them to, chiefly by imitation and emulation. The presence of the highest development and the highest inst.i.tutions among any race is a distinct benefit to all the others. It is a gift of _psychological environment_ to any one capable of appreciation."[152]

The impossibility of any advanced and prosperous community maintaining its social standards and handing them down to its posterity in these days of cheap and rapid transportation except by restrictions upon immigrations is thus explained by Professor Ross: "Now that cheap travel stirs the social deeps and far-beckoning opportunity fills the steerage, immigration becomes ever more serious to the people that hopes to rid itself at least of slums, 'ma.s.ses,' and 'submerged.' What is the good of practising prudence in the family if hungry strangers may crowd in and occupy at the banquet table of life the places reserved for its children? Shall it, in order to relieve the teeming lands of their unemployed, abide in the pit of wolfish compet.i.tion and renounce the fair prospect of growth in suavity, comfort, and refinement? If not, then the low-pressure society must not only slam its doors upon the indraft, but must double-lock them with forts and iron-clads, lest they be burst open by a.s.sault from some quarter where 'cannon food' is cheap."[153]

These admirable summaries of the immigration problem in its world-aspect are strikingly ill.u.s.trated by our own country, which may be considered as the leading, if not the "horrible," example. Probably few persons fully appreciate what magnificent racial treasures America possessed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The colonial stock was perhaps the finest that nature had evolved since the cla.s.sic Greeks. It was the very pick of the Nordics of the British Isles and adjacent regions of the European continent--picked at a time when those countries were more Nordic than now, since the industrial revolution had not yet begun and the consequent resurgence of the Mediterranean and Alpine elements had not taken place.

The immigrants of colonial times were largely exiles for conscience's sake, while the very process of migration was so difficult and hazardous that only persons of courage, initiative, and strong will-power would voluntarily face the long voyage overseas to a life of struggle in an untamed wilderness haunted by ferocious savages.

Thus the entire process of colonial settlement was one continuous, drastic cycle of eugenic selection. Only the racially fit ordinarily came, while the few unfit who did come were mostly weeded out by the exacting requirements of early American life.

The eugenic results were magnificent. As Madison Grant well says: "Nature had vouchsafed to the Americans of a century ago the greatest opportunity in recorded history to produce in the isolation of a continent a powerful and racially h.o.m.ogeneous people, and had provided for the experiment a pure race of one of the most gifted and vigorous stocks on earth, a stock free from the diseases, physical and moral, which have again and again sapped the vigor of the older lands. Our grandfathers threw away this opportunity in the blissful ignorance of national childhood and inexperience."[154] The number of great names which America produced at the beginning of its national life shows the high level of ability possessed by this relatively small people (only about 3,000,000 whites in 1790). With our hundred-odd millions we have no such output of genius to-day.

The opening decades of the nineteenth century seemed to portend for America the most glorious of futures. For nearly seventy years after the Revolution, immigration was small, and during that long period of ethnic isolation the colonial stock, unperturbed by alien influences, adjusted its cultural differences and began to display the traits of a genuine new type, harmonious in basic h.o.m.ogeneity and incalculably rich in racial promise. The general level of ability continued high and the output of talent remained extraordinarily large. Perhaps the best feature of the nascent "native American" race was its strong idealism. Despite the materialistic blight which was then creeping over the white world, the native American displayed characteristics more reminiscent of his Elizabethan forebears than of the materialistic Hanoverian Englishman. It was a wonderful time--and it was only the dawn!

But the full day of that wondrous dawning never came. In the late forties of the nineteenth century the first waves of the modern immigrant tide began breaking on our sh.o.r.es, and the tide swelled to a veritable deluge which never slackened till temporarily restrained by the late war. This immigration, to be sure, first came mainly from northern Europe, was thus largely composed of kindred stocks, and contributed many valuable elements. Only during the last thirty years have we been deluged by the truly alien hordes of the European east and south. But, even at its best, the immigrant tide could not measure up to the colonial stock _which it displaced_, not reinforced, while latterly it became a menace to the very existence of our race, ideals, and inst.i.tutions. All our slowly acquired balance--physical, mental, and spiritual--has been upset, and we to-day flounder in a veritable Serbonian bog, painfully trying to regain the solid ground on which our grandsires confidently stood.

The dangerous fallacy in that short-sighted idealism which seeks to make America the haven of refuge for the poor and oppressed of all lands, and its evil effects not only on America but on the rest of the world as well, has been convincingly exposed by Professor Ross. He has scant patience with those social "uplifters" whose sympathy with the visible alien at the gate is so keen that they have no feeling for the _invisible_ children of _our_ poor who will find the chances gone, nor for those at the gate of the to-be, who might have been born, but will not be.

"I am not of those," he writes, "who consider humanity and forget the nation, who pity the living but not the unborn. To me, those who are to come after us stretch forth beseeching hands as well as do the ma.s.ses on the other side of the globe. Nor do I regard America as something to be spent quickly and cheerfully for the benefit of pent-up millions in the backward lands. What if we become crowded without their ceasing to be so?

I regard it (America) as a nation whose future may be of unspeakable value to the rest of mankind, provided that the easier conditions of life here be made permanent by high standards of living, inst.i.tutions, and ideals, which finally may be appropriated by all men. We could have helped the Chinese a little by letting their surplus millions swarm in upon us a generation ago; but we have helped them infinitely more by protecting our standards and having something worth their copying when the time came."[155]

The perturbing influence of recent immigration must vex American life for many decades. Even if laws are pa.s.sed to-morrow so drastic as to shut out permanently the influx of undesirable elements, it will yet take several generations before the combined action of a.s.similation and elimination shall have restabilized our population and evolved a new type-norm approaching in fixity that which was on the point of crystallizing three-quarters of a century ago.

The biologist Humphrey thus punctures the "melting-pot" delusion: "Our 'melting-pot,'" he writes, "would not give us in a thousand years what enthusiasts expect of it--a _fusing_ of all our various racial elements into a new type which shall be the true American. It _will_ give us for many generations a perplexing diversity in ancestry, and since our successors must reach back into their ancestry for characteristics, this diversity will increase the uncertainty of their inheritances. They will inherit no stable blended character, because there is no such thing. They will inherit from a mixture of unlike characteristics contributed by unlike peoples, and in their inheritance they will have certain of these characteristics in full ident.i.ty, while certain others they will not have at all."[156]

Thus, under even the most favorable circ.u.mstances, we are in for generations of racial readjustment--an immense travail, essentially needless, since the final product will probably not measure up to the colonial standard. We will probably never (unless we adopt positive eugenic measures) be the race we might have been if America had been reserved for the descendants of the picked Nordics of colonial times.

But that is no reason for folding our hands in despairing inaction. On the contrary, we should be up and doing, for though some of our race-heritage has been lost, more yet remains. We can still be a very great people--if we will it so. Heaven be praised, the colonial stock was immensely prolific before the alien tide wrought its sterilizing havoc. Even to-day nearly one-half of our population is of the old blood, while many millions of the immigrant stock are sound in quality and a.s.similable in kind.

Only--the immigrant tide must at all costs be stopped and America given a chance to stabilize her ethnic being. It is the old story of the sibylline books. Some, to be sure, are ashes of the dead past; all the more should we conserve the precious volumes which remain.

One fact should be clearly understood: If America is not true to her own race-soul, she will inevitably lose it, and the brightest star that has appeared since h.e.l.las will fall like a meteor from the human sky, its brilliant radiance fading into the night. "We Americans," says Madison Grant, "must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America 'an asylum for the oppressed,' are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the melting-pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to 'all distinctions of race, creed, or color,' the type of native American of colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles and the Viking of the days of Rollo."[157]

And let us not lay any sacrificial unction to our souls. If we cheat our country and the world of the splendid promise of American life, we shall have no one to blame but ourselves, and we shall deserve, not pity, but contempt. As Professor Ross well puts it: "A people that has no more respect for its ancestors and no more pride of race than this deserves the extinction that surely awaits it."[158]

This extended discussion of the evil effects of even white immigration has, in my opinion, been necessary in order to get a proper perspective for viewing the problem of colored immigration. For it is perfectly obvious that if the influx of inferior kindred stocks is bad, the influx of wholly alien stocks is infinitely worse. When we see the damage wrought in America, for example, by the coming of persons who, after all, belong mostly to branches of the white race and who nearly all possess the basic ideals of white civilization, we can grasp the incalculably greater damage which would be wrought by the coming of persons wholly alien in blood and possessed of idealistic and cultural backgrounds absolutely different from ours. If the white immigrant can gravely disorder the national life, it is not too much to say that the colored immigrant would doom it to certain death.

This doom would be all the more certain because of the enormous potential volume of colored immigration. Beside it, the white immigrant tide of the past century would pale into insignificance. Leaving all other parts of the colored world out of the present discussion, three Asiatic countries--China, j.a.pan, and India--together have a population of nearly 800,000,000. That is practically twice the population of Europe--the source of white immigration. And the vast majority of these 800,000,000 Asiatics are potential immigrants into white territories. Their standards of living are so inconceivably low, their congestion is so painful, and their consequent desire for relief so keen that the high-standard, relatively empty white world seems to them a perfect paradise. Only the barrier of the white man's veto has prevented a perfect deluge of colored men into white lands, and even as it is the desperate seekers after fuller life have crept and crawled through every crevice in that barrier, until even these advance-guards to-day const.i.tute serious local problems along the white world's race-frontiers.

The simple truth of the matter is this: A mighty problem--a planet-wide problem--confronts us to-day and will increasingly confront us in the days to come. Says Putnam Weale: "A struggle has begun between the white man and all the other men of the world to decide whether non-white men--that is, yellow men, or brown men, or black men--may or may not invade the white man's countries in order there to gain their livelihood. The standard of living being low in the lands of colored men and high in the lands of the white man, it has naturally followed that it has been in the highest degree attractive for men of color during the past few decades to proceed to regions where their labor is rewarded on a scale far above their actual requirements--that is, on the white man's scale. This simple economic truth creates the inevitable contest which has for years filled all the countries bordering on the Pacific with great dread; and which, in spite of the temporary truce which the so-called 'Exclusion Policy' has now enforced, will go much farther than it has yet gone."[159]

The world-wide significance of colored immigration and the momentous conflicts which it will probably provoke are ably visualized by Professor Ross.

"The rush of developments," he writes, "makes it certain that the vision of a globe 'lapped in universal law' is premature. If the seers of the mid-century who looked for the speedy triumph of free trade had read their Malthus aright, they might have antic.i.p.ated the tariff barriers that have arisen on all hands within the last thirty years. So, to-day one needs no prophet's mantle to foresee that presently the world will be cut up with immigration barriers which will never be levelled until the intelligent accommodation of numbers to resources has greatly equalized population-pressure all over the globe.... Dams against the color races, with spillways of course for students, merchants, and travellers, will presently enclose the white man's world. Within this area minor dams will protect the high wages of the less prolific peoples against the surplus labor of the more prolific.

"a.s.suredly, every small-family nation will try to raise such a dam, and every big-family nation will try to break it down. The outlook for peace and disarmament is, therefore, far from bright. One needs but compare the population-pressures in France, Germany, Russia, and j.a.pan to realize that, even to-day, the real enemy of the dove of peace is not the eagle of pride or the vulture of greed, but the stork!

"The great point of doubt in birth restriction is the ability of the Western nations to retain control of the vast African, Australasian, and South American areas they have staked out as preserves to be peopled at their leisure with the diminis.h.i.+ng overflow of their population. If underbreeding should leave them without the military strength that alone can defend their far-flung frontiers in the southern hemisphere, those huge underdeveloped regions will a.s.suredly be filled with the children of the brown and the yellow races."[160]

Thus, white men, of whatever country and however far removed from personal contact with colored compet.i.tors, must realize that the question of colored immigration vitally concerns every white man, woman, and child; because nowhere--_absolutely nowhere_--can white labor compete on equal terms with colored immigrant labor. The grim truth is that there are enough hard-working colored men to swamp the whole white world.

No palliatives will serve to mitigate the ultimate issue, for if the white race should to-day surrender enough of its frontiers to ease the existing colored population-pressure, so quickly would these surrendered regions be swamped, and so rapidly would the fast-breeding colored races fill the homeland gaps, that in a very short time the diminished white world would be faced with an even louder colored clamor for admittance--backed by an increased power to enforce the colored will.

The profoundly destructive effects of colored compet.i.tion upon white standards of labor and living has long been admitted by all candid students of the problem. So warm a champion of Asiatics as Mr. Hyndman acknowledges that "the white workers cannot hold their own permanently against Chinese compet.i.tion in the labor market. The lower standard of life, the greater persistence, the superior education of the Chinese will beat them, and will continue to beat them."[161]

Wherever the white man has been exposed to colored compet.i.tion, particularly Asiatic compet.i.tion, the story is the same. Says the Australian Professor Pearson: "No one in California or Australia, where the effects of Chinese compet.i.tion have been studied, has, I believe, the smallest doubt that Chinese laborers, if allowed to come in freely, could starve all the white men in either country out of it, or force them to submit to harder work and a much lower standard of wages."[162]

And a South African, writing of the effects of Hindu immigration into Natal, remarks in similar vein: "The condition of South Africa--especially of Natal--is a warning to other lands to bar Asiatic immigrants.... Both economically and socially the presence of a large Oriental population is bad. The Asiatics either force out the white workers, or compel the latter to live down to the Asiatic level. There must be a marked deterioration amongst the white working cla.s.ses, which renders useless a great deal of the effort made in educational work. The white population is educated and trained according to the best ideas of the highest form of Western civilization--and has to compete for a livelihood against Asiatics! In South Africa this compet.i.tion is driving out the white working cla.s.s, because the average European cannot live down to the Asiatic level--and if it is essential that the European must do so, for the sake of his own happiness, do not educate him up to better things. If cheapness is the only consideration, if low wages are to come before everything else, then it is not only waste of money, but absolute cruelty, to inspire in the white working cla.s.ses tastes and aspirations which it is impossible for them to realize. To meet Asiatic compet.i.tion squarely, it would be necessary to train the white children to be Asiatics. Even the pro-Orientals would hardly advocate this."[163]

The lines just quoted squarely counter the "survival of the fittest" plea so often made by Asiatic propagandists for colored immigration. The argument runs that, since the Oriental laborer is able to underbid the white laborer, the Oriental is the "fittest" and should therefore be allowed to supplant the white man in the interests of human progress. This is of course merely clever use of the well-known fallacy which confuses the terms "fittest" and "best." The idea that, because a certain human type "fits" in certain ways a particular environment (often an unhealthy, man-made social environment), it should be allowed to drive out another type endowed with much richer potentialities for the highest forms of human evolution, is a sophistry as absurd as it is dangerous.

Professor Ross puts the matter very aptly when he remarks concerning Chinese immigration: "The compet.i.tion of white laborer and yellow is not so simple a test of human worth as some may imagine. Under good conditions the white man can best the yellow man in turning off work. But under bad conditions the yellow man can best the white man, because he can better endure spoiled food, poor clothing, foul air, noise, heat, dirt, discomfort, and microbes. Reilly can _outdo_ Ah-San, but Ah-San can _underlive_ Reilly. Ah-San cannot take away Reilly's job as being a better workman; but because he can live and do some work at a wage on which Reilly cannot keep himself fit to work at all, three or four Ah-Sans can take Reilly's job from him. And they will do it, too, unless they are barred out of the market where Reilly is selling his labor. Reilly's endeavor to exclude Ah-San from his labor market is not the case of a man dreading to pit himself on equal terms against a better man. Indeed, it is not quite so simple and selfish and narrow-minded as all that. It is a case of a man fitted to get the most out of good conditions refusing to yield his place to a weaker man able to withstand bad conditions."[164]

All this is no disparagement of the Asiatic. He is perfectly justified in trying to win broader opportunities in white lands. But we whites are equally justified in keeping these opportunities for ourselves and our children. The hard facts are that there is not enough for both; that when the enormous outward thrust of colored population-pressure bursts into a white land _it cannot let live_, but automatically crushes the white man out--first the white laborer, then the white merchant, lastly the white aristocrat; until every vestige of white has gone from that land forever.

This inexorable process is thus described by an Australian: "The colored races become agencies of economic disturbance and social degradation. They sap and destroy the upward tendencies of the poorer whites. The latter, instead of always having something better to look at and strive after, have a lower standard of living, health, and cleanliness set before them, and the results are disastrous. They sink to the lower level of the Asiatics, and the degrading tendency proceeds upward by saturation, affecting several grades of society.... There is an insidious, yet irresistible, process of social degradation. The colored race does not intentionally, or even consciously, lower the European; it simply happens so, by virtue of a natural law which neither race can control. As debased coinage will drive out good currency, so a lowered standard of living will inexorably spread until its effects are universally felt."[165]

It all comes down to a question of self-preservation. And, despite what sentimentalists may say, self-preservation _is_ the first law of nature.

To love one's cultural, idealistic, and racial heritage; to swear to pa.s.s that heritage unimpaired to one's children; to fight, and, if need be, to die in its defense: all this is eternally right and proper, and no amount of casuistry or sentimentality can alter that unalterable truth. An Englishman put the thing in a nutsh.e.l.l when he wrote: "Asiatic immigration is not a question of sentiment, but of sheer existence. The whole problem is summed up in Lafcadio Hearn's pregnant phrase: 'The East can _underlive_ the West.'"[166]

Rigorous exclusion of colored immigrants is thus vitally necessary for the white peoples. Unfortunately, this exclusion policy will not be easily maintained. Colored population-pressure is insistent and increasing, while the matter is still further complicated by the fact that, while no white _community_ can gain by colored immigration, white _individuals_--employers of labor--may be great gainers and hence often tend to put private interest above racial duty. Barring a handful of sincere but misguided cosmopolitan enthusiasts, it is unscrupulous business interests which are behind every white proposal to relax the exclusion laws protecting white areas.

In fairness to these business interests, however, let us realize their great temptations. To the average employer, especially in the newer areas of white settlement where white labor is scarce and dictatorial, what could be more enticing than the vision of a boundless supply of cheap and eager colored labor?

Consider this Californian apprais.e.m.e.nt of the Chinese coolie: "The Chinese coolie is the ideal industrial machine, the perfect human ox. He will transform less food into more work, with less administrative friction, than any other creature. Even now, when the scarcity of Chinese labor and the consequent rise in wages have eliminated the question of cheapness, the Chinese have still the advantage over all other servile labor in convenience and efficiency. They are patient, docile, industrious, and above all 'honest' in the business sense that they keep their contracts.

Also, they cost nothing but money. Any other sort of labor costs human effort and worry, in addition to the money. But Chinese labor can be bought like any other commodity, at so much a dozen or a hundred. The Chinese contractor delivers the agreed number of men, at the agreed time and place, for the agreed price, and if any one should drop out he finds another in his place. The men board and lodge themselves, and when the work is done they disappear from the employer's ken until again needed.

The entire transaction consists in paying the Chinese contractor an agreed number of dollars for an agreed result. This elimination of the human element reduces the labor problem to something the employer can understand. The Chinese labor-machine, from his standpoint, is perfect."[167]

What is true of the Chinese is true to a somewhat lesser extent of all "coolie" labor. Hence, once introduced into a white country, it becomes immensely popular--among employers. How it was working out in South Africa, before the exclusion acts there, is clearly explained in the following lines: "The experience of South Africa is that when once Asiatic labor is admitted, the tendency is for it to grow. One manufacturer secures it and is able to cut prices to such an extent that the other manufacturers are forced either to employ Asiatics also or to reduce white wages to the Asiatic level. Oriental labor is something which does not stand still. The taste for it grows. A party springs up financially interested in increasing it. In Natal to-day the suggestion that Indian labor should no longer be imported is met by an outcry from the planters, the farmers, and landowners, and a certain number of manufacturers, that industries and agriculture will be ruined. So the coolie s.h.i.+ps continue to arrive at Durban, and Natal becomes more and more a land of black and brown people and less a land of white people. Instead of becoming a Canada or New Zealand, it is becoming a Trinidad or Cuba. Instead of white settlers, there are brown settlers.... The working-cla.s.s white population has to go, as it is going in Natal. The country becomes a country of white landlords and supervisors controlling a horde of Asiatics. It does not produce a nation or a free people. It becomes what in the old days of English colonization was called a 'plantation.'"[168]

All this gives a clearer idea of the difficulties involved in a successful guarding of the gates. But it also confirms the conviction that the gates must be strictly guarded. If anything further were needed to reinforce that conviction it should be the present state of those white outposts where the gates have been left ajar.

Hawaii is a good example. This mid-Pacific archipelago was brought under white control by masterful American Nordics, who established Anglo-Saxon inst.i.tutions and taught the natives the rudiments of Anglo-Saxon civilization. The native Hawaiians, like the other Polynesian races, could not stand the pressure of white civilization, and withered away. But the white oligarchy which controlled the islands determined to turn their marvellous fertility to immediate profit. Labor was imported from the ends of the earth, the sole test being working ability without regard to race or color. There followed a great influx of Asiatic labor--at first Chinese until annexation to the United States brought Hawaii under our Chinese exclusion laws; later on Filipinos, Koreans, and, above all, j.a.panese.

The results are highly instructive. These Asiatics arrived as agricultural laborers to work on the plantations. But they did not stay there. Saving their wages, they pushed vigorously into all the middle walks of life. The Hawaiian fisherman and the American artisan or shopkeeper were alike ousted by ruthless undercutting. To-day the American mechanic, the American storekeeper, the American farmer, even the American contractor, is a rare bird indeed, while j.a.panese corporations are buying up the finest plantations and growing the finest pineapples and sugar. Fully half the population of the islands is j.a.panese, while the Americans are being literally encysted as a small and dwindling aristocracy. In 1917 the births of the two races were: American, 295; j.a.panese, 5,000! Comment is superfluous.

Clear round the globe, the island of Mauritius, the half-way house between Asia and Africa, tells the same tale. Originally settled by Europeans, mostly French, Mauritius imported negroes from Africa to work its rich soil. This at once made impossible the existence of a white laboring cla.s.s, though the upper, middle, and artisan cla.s.ses remained unaffected by the economically backward blacks. A hundred years ago one-third of the population were whites. But after the abolition of slavery the negroes quit work, and Asiatics were imported to take their place. The upshot was that the whites were presently swamped beneath the Asiatic tide--here mostly Hindus. To-day the Hindus alone form more than two-thirds of the whole population, the whites numbering less than one-tenth. Indeed, the very outward aspect of the island is changing. The old French landmarks are going, and the fabled land of "Paul and Virginia" is becoming a bit of Hindustan, with a Chinese fringe. Even Port Louis, the capital town, has mostly pa.s.sed from white to Indian or Chinese hands.

Now what do these two world-sundered cases mean? They mean, as an English writer justly remarks, "that under the British flag Mauritius has become an outpost of Asia, just as Hawaii is another such and under the Stars and Stripes."[169] And, of course, there is Natal, already mentioned, which, at the moment when the recent South African Exclusion Act stayed the Hindu tide, had not only been partially transformed into an Asiatic land, but was fast becoming a centre of Asiatic radiation all over South Africa.

With such grim warnings before their eyes, it is not strange that the l.u.s.ty young Anglo-Saxon communities bordering the Pacific--Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, and our own "coast"--have one and all set their faces like flint against the Oriental and have emblazoned across their portals the legend: "All White." Nothing is more striking than the instinctive and instantaneous solidarity which binds together Australians and Afrikanders, Californians and Canadians, into a "sacred union" at the mere whisper of Asiatic immigration.

Everywhere the slogan is the same. "The 'White Australia' idea," cries an antipodean writer, "is not a political theory. It is a gospel. It counts for more than religion; for more than flag, because the flag waves over all kinds of races; for more than the empire, for the empire is mostly black, or brown or yellow; is largely heathen, largely polygamous, partly cannibal. In fact, the White Australia doctrine is based on the necessity for choosing between national existence and national suicide."[170] "White Australia!" writes another Australian in similar vein. "Australians of all cla.s.ses and political affiliations regard the policy much as Americans regard the Const.i.tution. It is their most articulate article of faith.

The reason is not far to seek.... Australian civilization is little more than a partial fringe round the continental coastline of 12,210 miles. The coast and its hinterlands are settled and developed, although not completely for the entire circ.u.mference; in the centre of the country lie the apparently illimitable wastes of the Never-Never Land, occupied entirely by scrub, snakes, sand, and blackfellows. The almost manless regions of the island-continent are a terrible menace. It is impossible to police at all adequately such an enormous area. And the peoples of Asia, beating at the bars that confine them, rousing at last from their age-long slumber, are chafing at the restraints imposed upon their free entry into and settlement of such uninhabited, undeveloped lands."[171]

So the Australians, 5,000,000 whites in a far-off continent as large as the United States, defy clamoring Asia and swear to keep Australia a white man's land. Says Professor Pearson: "We are guarding the last part of the world in which the higher races can increase and live freely, for the higher civilization. We are denying the yellow race nothing but what it can find in the home of its birth, or in countries like the Indian Archipelago, where the white man can never live except as an exotic."[172]