The Canadian Commonwealth Part 8

We need room for colonization--says the Hindu. Let England lose India, and she loses five-sixths of the British Empire. By refusing admission to the Hindu, Canada is endangering British dominion in India. Moral conditions there are appalling, of course; but say the missionaries--give these people a chance, and they will become as good as any of us. Are we not sprung from the same Aryan stock?

British Columbia has immense tracts of arable land. Why not give India's millions a chance on it as colonizers?

There is not so much sedition among the Hindus of British Columbia as among Canadian-born Socialists, who rant of the flag as "the b.l.o.o.d.y rag."

The vices of the Hindu are no worse than the vices of the low whites.

They are British subjects and have a right to admission. Admission is not a privilege but a right.

How can we expect good morals among three to five thousand men who are forcibly separated from wives and children? Admit their wives to prevent deterioration. This argument was used by a Hindu addressing audiences in Toronto.

What right have Canadians to point the finger of scorn at the reproach of the child wife when the age of marriage in one province is twelve years?

In the days of the mutiny the Sikh proved his loyalty. To-day the Indian troops are proving their loyalty by fighting for the empire in Europe.

Many of the Canadians now denouncing the Hindu made money selling them real estate in Vancouver, and expropriation is behind the idea of exclusion.

The admission of the Hindu would relieve British Columbia's great need for manual laborers.

Canadian missionaries to India are received as friends. Why are the Hindus not received as friends in Canada?

Why should a Sikh not marry a white woman as one did in Vancouver? This question was asked by the official publication of the Sikhs in Vancouver.

If Canada shuts her doors to the Hindus, let the Hindus shut doors to Canadians.

These are not my arguments. They are the arguments of the people advocating the free admission of people from India to Canada.

To these arguments the Pacific Coast makes answer. Likewise, the answer is not mine:

We know that you as a people need room for colonization; but if we admit you as colonists, will your presence drive out other colonists, as it has done in Australia and South Africa; as the presence of colored people prevents the coming of other colonists to the southern states? If we have to decide between having you and excluding Canadians, or excluding you and having Canadians, we can not afford to hesitate in our decision.

We must keep our own land for our own people.

Australia and South Africa have excluded the Hindu--South Africa's educational test amounts to that--and that has not imperiled British dominion in India. Why should it in Canada? The very fact there are millions ready to come is what alarms us. Morals are low--you acknowledge--and your people would be better if they had a chance; but would the chance not cost us too dearly, as the improvement of the blacks has cost the South in crime and contaminated blood? We are sorry for you, just as we are sorry for any plague-stricken region; but we do not welcome you among us because of that pity.

There may not be so much sedition among the Hindus of British Columbia as among Canadian-born Socialists, who rant of the flag as "a b.l.o.o.d.y rag"; but our Socialistic seditionists have never yet been accused of collecting two million dollars to send home to India to buy rifles for the revolution. Canadian Socialists have never yet collected one dime to buy rifles. These are not my accusations. They are accusations that have been in the very air of Vancouver and San Francisco. If they are true, they ought to be proved true. If they are untrue, they ought to be proved untrue; but in view of the shoutings over patriotism and of Hopkinson's a.s.sa.s.sination, they come with a rude jar to claims grounded on loyalty. Could Hindus who landed in British Columbia dest.i.tute a few years ago possibly have that amount of money among them? At last census they had property in Vancouver alone to the amount of six million dollars, held collectively for the whole community.

Their vices may be no worse than the vices of the low whites, but if immigration officials find that whites low or high have vices, those whites are excluded, be they English, Irish, Scotch, or Greek.

The Hindus are British subjects, but Canada does not admit British subjects unless she wants them--unless they can give a clean bill of health and morals.

Canada does not regard admission as a right to any race, European, Asian, African. She considers her citizens.h.i.+p a privilege and reserves to herself the right to extend or not to extend that privilege to whom she will.

That separation from families will excuse base and lewd morals is a view that Canada will never admit. Her sons go forth unaccompanied by wives or sisters to lumber camps and mines and pioneer shacks, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred come back clean as they went forth, and manlier. That women should be victims on an altar of l.u.s.t is an argument that may appeal to the Asiatic--the sentiment all draped in wisteria and lilies, of course; but it isn't an argument that will prove anything in Canada but the advocate's unfitness for citizens.h.i.+p.

What reason have Canadians to point the finger of reproach at the inst.i.tution of the child wife, when the age of marriage in one province is low as twelve? And that brings up the whole question of the child wife. Because one province has the marriage age criminally low does not prove that that province approves of marriages at twelve. In the whole history of that province marriages at that age have been as rare as the pastime of skinning a man alive, and that province has no specific law against skinning a man alive. It has no such law because that type of crime is unknown. But can it be said that the inst.i.tution of child marriage is an unknown or even a rare crime in India? The Hindu wives for whom loud outcry is being made are little girls barely eight years of age, whom before marriage the husbands have never seen, men of thirty-five and forty and forty-eight. Does Canada desire the system of the child wife embodied in her national life? Suppose one hundred thousand Hindu colonists came to the vacant arable lands of British Columbia. As the inalienable right of a British subject, the colonist must be allowed to bring in his wife. What if she is a child to whom he was married in her infancy? The colonist being a British subject is to be given a vote. How would Canada abolish the child wife system if Hindu votes outnumbered Canadian votes? Forget all about the rifle fund--the discovery of which was paid for in Hopkinson's life! Forget all about labor and mill owner and color of pigments! You know now why the Oriental question is more than skin-deep. Go a little deeper in this child-wife thing! Don't balk at the horror of it! The Pacific Coast wants you to know a few medical facts. Hundreds of thousands of children in India, age from nine to twelve, are wives actually living with husbands; and the husbands are in many cases from thirty to eighty years of age. Anglo-Saxons regard these unions as criminal. One-third of all children born of mothers under sixteen years of age die in infancy because of the tortures to the mother's body, compared to which the tortures of the Inquisition were merciful. Does Canada want that system embodied in her national life? Under Canadian law such crimes are treated to thirty-nine lashes: under American law to Judge Lynch.

Twenty-five per cent. of the women of India die prematurely because of the crimes perpetrated through child marriage. Twenty-five per cent.

become invalids from the same cause. Nine million girl wives in India are under fifteen years of age; two million are under eleven.

I asked a British Columbia sawmill owner why the Hindu could not speed up with a Pole or Swede.

"No stamina," he answered. "Too many generations of vice! Too many generations of birth from immature mothers; no dower of strength from birth."

The advocates of Hindu colonization in Canada glibly advise "prohibiting child wives." To bar out child wives sounds easy. How are you to know they are child wives and not daughters? If one thing more than another has been established in Vancouver about Hindus, not excepting the leaders, it is that you can not believe a Hindu under oath. Also British law does not allow you to bar out a subject's wife unless she be diseased or vicious. If you let down the bar to any section of the Hindu, teeming millions will come--with a demand to vote.

That Canada's continuous pa.s.sage law is immoral and intolerable no one denies. It is a subterfuge and a joke. The day the j.a.panese steams.h.i.+p tested the law by bringing pa.s.sengers direct from land of birth the law fell down and Canada had to face squarely the question of exclusion. As the world knows, the s.h.i.+pload of human cargo after lying for months in Vancouver Harbor was sent back, and Hindu leaders proved their claims of a right to citizens.h.i.+p by a.s.sa.s.sinating Hopkinson.

To the claim that the Sikhs are loyal, Canada answers--"for their own sake." If British protection were withdrawn from India to-morrow, a thousand petty chiefs would fly at one another's throats. The idea that expropriation is behind exclusion could be entertained only by an Oriental mind. Expropriation is possible under Canadian law only for treason. Imperial unity is no more threatened in Canada by exclusion than it was threatened in South Africa and Australia. The Hindus are adapted to the cultivation of the soil, but if they come in millions, will any white race sit down beside them? Why does immigration persistently refuse to go to the southern states? Because of a black shadow over the land. Does Canada want such a shadow?

The missionary argument can hardly be taken seriously. Missionaries do not go to India to colonize. They do not introduce white vices. They go at Canada's expense to give free medical and social service to India.

"Why should a Sikh not marry a white woman?" There, again, you are up against a side of the subject that is neither violet water nor pink tea; but--it is a vital side of the subject. For the same reason that the South objects to and pa.s.ses laws against mixed unions of the races.

These laws are not the registration of prejudice. They are the registration of terrible lessons in experience. It is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of fact. What is feared is not the marriage of a Sikh who is refined to a white woman who knows what she is doing. What is feared is the effect of that union on the lewd Hindu; the effect on the safety of the uncultured white woman and white girl. Any one on the Coast who has lived next to Asiatics, any one in India or the Philippines knows what this means in terms of hideous terrible fact that can not be set down here. Vancouver knows. "I'll see," said an officer in the Philippines of his native valet, "that the--dog turns up missing;" and every man present knew why; and when the officer set out on an unnamed expedition with his valet, the valet did "turn up missing." There are vices for which a white man kills. "Have not the English carried vices to India?" a Hindu protagonist asked me. Yes, answered British Columbia, but we do not purpose poisoning the new young life of Canada to compensate the vices of English soldiers who have gone to pieces morally in India.

As to shutting Canadians out of India, Canada would accept that challenge gladly. When Canadians carry vices to India--says Canada--shut them out.

These are the reasons given for the Pacific Coast's aversion to the Hindu, and even with the arguments stated explicitly, there is a great deal untold and untellable.

For instance, some of the leaders talking loudest in Eastern Canada in the name of the Sikh are not Sikhs at all, and one at least has a criminal record in San Francisco.

For instance again, when the coronation festivities were on in England, there was a very peculiar guard kept round the Hindu quarters. It would be well for some of the eastern women's clubs to inquire why that was; also why the fact was hushed up that two white women of bad character were carried out of that compound dead.

Said a mill owner, one who employs many Hindus, "If the East could understand how some of these penniless leaders grow rich, they would realize that the Hindu has our employment sharks beaten to a frazzle. I take in a new man from one of these leaders. The leader gets two dollars or five dollars for finding this fellow a job. I have barely got the man broken in when the leader yanks him off to another job and sends me a new man, getting, of course, the employment agent fee for both changes."

"But why not let them come out here and work and go back?" asks the East.

Because that is just what the Hindu will not do. When he comes, he fights for the franchise to stay. That is the real meaning behind the fight over cases now in the courts.

"They are curious fellows, poor beggars," said a police court official to me. "They have no more conception of what truth means than a dog stealing a bone. We had a Hindu come in here as complainant against another man, with his back hacked to beef steak. We had very nearly sent the defendant up for a long term in the 'pen,' when we got wind that these two fellows had been bitter enemies--old spites--and that there was something queer about the complainant's shanty. We sent out to examine.

The fellow had stuck bits of gla.s.s all over the inside of his shack walls and then cut his own back to pay an old grudge against the other man.

Another fellow rushed in here gesticulating complaint, who was literally soaked in blood. We had had our experience and so sending for an interpreter, we soused this fellow into a bathtub. Every dab came off and there was not a scratch under."

"You say the Hindu is the negro problem multiplied by ten, plus craft,"

said a life-long resident of India to me. "That is hardly correct. The Hindu is different from the negro. He is intellectual and spiritual as well as crafty and sensuous. You will never have trouble with the Hindu, if you keep him in his place--"

"But do you think a democratic country can what you call 'keep a race in its place'? The very genius of our democracy is that we want each individual to come up out of his place to a higher place."

"Then you will learn a hard lesson here in Canada."

What kind of a lesson? Again, let us take facts, not opinions!

A clergyman's wife in Vancouver, full of missionary zeal for India, thought it her duty to accord the Hindu exactly the same treatment as to an American or English immigrant. She took a man as general house servant and treated him with the same genial courtesy she had treated all other help in her home. You know what is coming--don't you? The man mistook it for evil or else failed to subdue the crimes of the centuries in his own blood. Had he not come from a land where a woman more or less did not matter, and hundreds of thousands of little girls are yearly sacrificed on the altars of Moloch? I need not give details. As a matter of fact, there are none. Asiatic ideas about women collided violently with facts which any Canadian takes for granted and does not talk about! No Anglo-Saxon (thank G.o.d) is too ladylike not to have a bit of the warrior woman left in her blood. The Hindu was thrown out of that house. Then the woman reasoned with the blind persistence peculiar to any conscientious good woman, who always puts theory in place of fact!

There are blackguards in every race. There are scoundrels among Englishmen in India. Why should she allow one criminal among the Hindus to prejudice her against this whole people? And she at once took another Hindu man servant in the house. This time she kept him in the kitchen and garden. Within a month the same thing happened with a little daughter. This Hindu also went out on his head. No more were employed in that house. That woman's husband was one of the Pacific Coast clergymen who pa.s.sed the resolution, "that the Hindus would not affiliate with our Canadian civilization."

Personally I think that resolution would have been a great deal more enlightening to the average Easterner if the ministerial a.s.sociation had plainly called a spade a spade.

IV

With the Chinaman conditions are different. In the first place, since China obtained freedom from the old cast-iron dynasty, Chinamen have not wanted to colonize in Canada. The leaders of the young China party laid their plots and published their liberty journals from presses in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Vancouver and Victoria shops, but having gained their liberty, they went back to China. The Chinaman does not want to colonize. He does not want a vote. He wants only to earn his money on the Pacific Coast and h.o.a.rd it and go home to China with it. The fact that he does not want to remain in the country but comes only to work and go back has always been used as an argument against him. Neither does he consider himself your equal. Nor does he want to marry your daughter, nor have you consider him a prince of the royal blood in disguise--a pose in which the little j.a.p is as great an adept as the English c.o.c.kney who drops enough "h's" to build a monument, all the while he is telling you of his royal blue blood. If you mistake the Chinaman for a prince in disguise, the results will be just what they were with a poor girl In New York four or five years ago. The results will be just what they always are when you mistake a mongrel for a thoroughbred.