Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/196

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184
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

bettered, the dangers that threaten from such inexhaustible sources of human supply become easy of appreciation.

It may well be inferred that a line of public policy on the part of any other nation intended to shut out such a class of immigration as this must be literally "iron-clad" in its construction, and must involve measures of defense practically as stern, unrelenting, and costly in their character as are the measures of defense against invasion commonly taken among nations at war with each other.

So far, Chinese immigration in other countries has been sufficiently powerful to break down all the barriers that have been reared against it. Wherever they have gained a foothold there they have continued to go, there they have increased and multiplied. Wherever they have gone, in earlier or later times, prolonged contact with them and competition in the field of labor have developed the same race antipathies that exist between the American people on the Pacific coast and the Chinese to-day.

Since 1860 200,000 Chinese have landed in Chili and Peru. Nearly 400,000 have found their way into the United States through the port of San Francisco since the Chinese immigration first began. The numbers that have migrated to Australia, the Sandwich Islands, and other countries have been enormous. The larger part of this emigration from China has occurred since the walls of Chinese exclusiveness were battered down by English and French cannon in 1858. It is clear that, while China was then opened to the commerce and intercourse of the world, so the world was likewise opened to the free flow of the yellow tide of Chinese immigration, sweeping with constantly augmented and resistless force in every direction. We have seen the incentive of poverty and misery at home that underlies and induces Chinese emigration. We have seen that with them it is either expatriation or starvation. We have seen that massacre and cruelty can not change their purpose or intimidate them, and we may well ask ourselves the question whether the mild type of legislation embodied in the "Scott Exclusion Act" can be more effective in this direction. Assuming that it will be sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States, assuming that it will effectually stop the landing of Chinese in our ports, how far will it prove effective in barring the entrance of Chinese along the thousands of miles of frontier that intervene between British Columbia on the north and Mexico on the south? Is it to be presumed that Chinese cunning and perseverance, inspired by their wretched condition at home, and the incentive of good wages, constant employment, and a more comfortable mode of life here, will not overcome all obstacles that this hasty and crude kind of legislation has set up against them? Is it to be presumed that a law that imposes upon