The Pacific Triangle Part 24

CHAPTER XVIII

AUSTRALASIA

New Zealand and Australia are to-day the only spots in the world wherein the white race may expand without encroaching upon already existing and developed races. The extent to which they are taking advantage of their opportunities, the extent to which they are enlarging the scope and the quality of progressive civilization is the measure of their right to the maintenance of their exclusive "White-Australasia" policy.

I confess at the outset that I am at a loss for an adequate argument against this policy. Narrow, selfish, dog-in-the-manger-like as it may be, we are faced with the other question: From time out of mind China and India have had two of the largest slices of the world's surface.

What have they done with them? How can India and Asia, having littered up their domains with human beings, ask that more of the world be turned over to them for a repet.i.tion of the same ghastly reproduction? They have made it impossible, with their degradation of womanhood and their exaltation of caste and ancestry, for new life to start with anything like a decent chance. Is there not every reason to believe that permitted to take up quarters in the open s.p.a.ces of the white man's world, they will do the same?

True that the white man, in both of these cases, has wrested his lands from existing native tribes. But it was also true that, in New Zealand at least, and through Polynesia, the natives were immigrants who in their turn imposed on yet more primitive natives, as did the j.a.panese.

Furthermore, no race on earth has been given a better opportunity to make good than has the Maori in New Zealand. The Australoid seems on the whole not equipped for the effort. There have been cases of Australian blacks making good. There is the case of the savage who after receiving an education became a Shakespearean scholar. But the exception only proves the rule. Furthermore, though there is bitter opposition to any white man marrying a native black woman in Australia--an opposition that is calling for legal action from some quarters so that such marriage will be in future impossible--still, the White-Australia policy is not aimed against the blacks. These will either take hold of themselves and make good, in time, or will die out. Be that as it may, there is no answer to the Asiatic demand for admission based on the argument about the white man's plunder.

The only other argument is that, if this is the case, the white man must get out of Asia. There too, it seems to me, is a weak spot. The white man in Asia--as man to man--does not lower the standard of the civilization of the native; nor is he ever likely to migrate in numbers large enough to create a problem. Only politically, where a leeching-process exists, where native industries are destroyed by cheap foreign products (like that of cotton goods, which were forced upon the Indians by the British, to the utter ruination of the Indian textiles) has the havoc been serious. That is a real argument, and it is up to the Asiatics so to adjust their own affairs and to come together as to "oust" the white man,--a problem for the natives to solve for themselves.

There is still another consideration. What of j.a.pan? j.a.pan has national unity, she is advancing. Is she, then, to be made an exception in the White-Australia policy? The answer is, j.a.pan must do as she would be done by, an answer which will be enlarged upon in the chapter dealing with j.a.pan.

Having thus focused on the negative phases of this discussion, let us see what is written on the inner side of the Australasian shield. Before we can at all understand the motives that move Australasia in the direction she is going, and foresee the future, we shall have to know by what channels she came to be what she is, what ideals are parents to her being, and what ideals are her offspring.

Strange as it may seem, Britain's interest in her south Pacific possessions have always been more or less mild. When the question of annexing New Zealand came up in 1839, the Duke of Wellington said in Parliament that Great Britain already had too many colonies. It is common knowledge that she gave them as much rope as they would take, that when she had the opportunity of acquiring the Samoan group in 1889 she let it slip, and that she took the Fiji Islands only after their chief, Thakambau, offered them in liquidation of unjust debts to America. In other words, it was New Zealand and Australia that held on to the mother country, instead of the reverse. And in order to understand the spirit of the Dominion and the Commonwealth, we must consider the reasons for their clinging to "home."

Australia was first settled by men convicted of offences against Britain's then crude sense of justice; but New Zealand was devised as a colonial scheme under which every feature of British life was to be transplanted. When Europeans came to America, political and religious freedom was sought. When Great Britain went to New Zealand, eighty-five years ago, society was politically and religiously free, but industrial organization was awaiting an ambitious hand. In New Zealand it was not, as Havelock Ellis puts it so vividly, "the roving of a race with piratical and poetic instincts invading old England where few stocks arrived save by stringent selection of the sea." They did not come because of romantic longing, nor to escape oppression and restriction.

The story of the development of New Zealand, from settlement and conquest of the Maories to the beginning of that legislation which has made it famous, is the story of conservatism. When the first shipload of colonists set out from England, their prospectus was a doc.u.ment of conservatism. The aim of the projectors was to transplant every phase and station and cla.s.s of English life, to build in the other end of the world another England.

Doubtless the fathers of this scheme were seeking to overcome the fear of forced transplantation which had made of Australia a land of horror in antic.i.p.ation, and hence they spread broadcast accounts of the sort of colony New Zealand was to be, which made it alluring. But such are the erring tendencies of human nature that Australia, intended to be the land of one of the worst forms of indentured and penal servitude and the perpetuation of unprogressiveness, set the pace for the entire world in untried liberalism in industry, while New Zealand, likewise advanced, has developed her latent conservatism in regard to imperialism to a marked degree.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MOUNTAINS ARE CALLED THE REMARKABLES Farmer M---- had the reputation for being the worst boss in the Wakatipu (New Zealand)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BLUE MOUNTAINS OF AUSTRALIA Seen from this side they look more like gorges]

[Ill.u.s.tration: AUSTRALIA DENUDING HERSELF Photo from Brown Bros.]

For apart from the experiments in labor legislation, New Zealand has never lost any of the dependence on England. She seems to be afraid of her isolation, lest, deprived of communication with the world, she should be forced into a condition such as that in which the white man found the heliolithic Maories. Canada might become a nation separate from Britain; so might Australia. But New Zealand has not even that proximity to a continent which made England what she is, for she is twelve hundred miles from her nearest neighbor. In consequence, the New Zealanders have always maintained a strong leaning toward the homeland, whereas in Australia early resentment alienated the settlers. The New Zealander to-day is the exact replica of the Englishman as we knew him; the Australian is a compromise between an Englishman and an American.

The modern Australian on the east coast of the continent is as little an Englishman as possible. I have heard any number of Australians resent being called English. The last "convict" was brought to Australia in 1840; yet the Australians are very conscious of this stigma on them. The other day an English engineer told me that in Subiaco, one of the suburbs of Perth, it was impossible for one to join the tennis-club whose grandfather was born in Australia--lest that ign.o.ble ancestor should have pa.s.sed on some of the "taint" to his unfortunate offspring.

Yet in the eyes of enlightened legislation, the taint involved is of course questionable.

It is therefore not to be wondered at that Australia kept growing farther and farther from England. In the early days each settlement maintained its own government, and so great was the jealousy among the settlements that they sought to bar one another even in the construction of railroads. Victoria built a broad-gage line, New South Wales, a narrower, and Queensland the narrowest,--not mere engineering accident due to any notion of superiority of the special line, but clearly and openly to make communication of one with another difficult. But by 1900 the settlements had outgrown their childish squabbling, and they became federated into the Commonwealth of Australia.

Though this brought them together within Australia, it awoke New Zealand to the danger of being drawn into that union against her will. "The Melbourne Age" prophesied that in a quarter of a century they would be federated. "The fate and destiny of Australia and New Zealand were the same and they should be united in the defense of these distant lands that were held by people of the same thought and same political system."

But there never has been much love lost between them. New Zealanders have been anathema in Australia, and Australians hadn't a ghost of a chance of getting a job in New Zealand. Nor was this a matter of different standards of living, except that they both discriminated against the Englishman. And not without reason, for the type of Englishman who set out for the Antipodes was one who generally had nothing to sustain him at home. To the Australasians he was virtually a foreigner, and foreigners of any sort are few in the far South, and are encouraged still less. Yet there is excessive pride in the fact that something like 98 per cent. of the inhabitants are British.

In view of the economic departures they have taken from European conceptions, this would seem a paradox. But even among the workers, the psychological effect of "home" is apparent to the most casual observer.

Though material security has been a.s.sured by the State, the result of much of the legislation in the Antipodes seems to me to have been something akin to the cla.s.s system in England. The worker has become legally recognized as a worker, he has been given a minimum wage and protection against imposition, but any effort on the part of labor to crystallize its ideals is still obnoxious to the ma.s.ses. There is not even any of the impulse found among American workers toward that rise in the social scale which is essentially bourgeois. There is a most decided tendency to accept the status of worker in the good old English fashion.

Working-people do not regard themselves as "gentlemen" or as "ladies,"

these terms in New Zealand having the same significance they have in the old country. Deference to one who does not look like a laborer is p.r.o.nounced, and the average workman is more ambitious for the "gentleman" than he is for himself. This spirit obtains much more in New Zealand than in Australia.

Than dignity in labor nothing in the world could be more worthy. But if that dignity spells merely content, it lays society open to a renewal of the very cla.s.s divisions industrial progress has sought to remove. The laborer is too content to remain a laborer actively to enter the lists against injustice. And in a short time you have those who refused to be doped by the talk of virtue in labor on the top, and the laborer at the bottom.

Yet, socially and outwardly, there are not the gaps between the cla.s.ses in New Zealand that are found in Australia. There are no great restaurants and pleasure places for the rich. All people visit the dainty little tea-rooms, and often workingmen come dressed in their working-clothes, with unwashed hands. In Dunedin the proprietor of one of the best tea-rooms handed out little cards to laborers with "Your Patronage is Undesirable" on them, but the public howled his practice out of existence. This is largely because the level of life in New Zealand is more even. The wealthy do not display themselves over-much, and the most obvious club life is that among the workers. Workingmen's clubs are equipped with very good libraries and reading-rooms, but also with tremendous circular bars fully as much frequented as the book-shelves.

The result is that though, from a progressive point of view, New Zealand is outwardly tame and sober, from a consideration of health, the standard of life is universally good. Any great influx of peoples with standards of living that would of necessity demoralize this normality, would give the country a setback which might take generations to overcome. On the other hand, though the present state of affairs might continue indefinitely, unless New Zealand gains in numbers, her place among the influential members of the Pacific Ocean nations is certain to be strained, if not jeopardized.

Torn between these economic enthusiasms of a small country and the restraining influences of a tradition that is essentially imperialistic, New Zealand has a pretty hard time of it. Naturally enough, she is holding on to her beloved mother country with an excessive amount of talk, while at the same time nibbling away at the ties that bind her.

She is in the hardest position of any of the Pacific countries. By tradition adoring England and scorning Australia, emulating the one and trying to keep peace with the other, realizing that proximity makes her more than a brother of her continental kin, looking toward America for applause and a.s.sistance, New Zealand is shaping a policy that will probably become a patchwork of colors,--and most interesting to look at.

But Australia is cutting the waters with the force of a triple-screw turbine. And toward Australia we shall have to look for the leadership of British policy in the Pacific. Canada is too close to Europe and America ever to become the real leader in the destinies of the Pacific.

The truth of this statement becomes manifest when one watches the inner workings of the island continent. Though New Zealand is more widely known for its great liberalism, there is really more freedom of thought in Australia, more freedom from traditional thinking, more boldness of expression. That was manifest during the war when the conscription issue came up. The New Zealand Legislature simply enacted a conscription measure. In Australia, the Government tried twice to force it through by way of a referendum, and twice it failed. William Morris Hughes, the Prime Minister, had gone to England to attend a conference, promising that conscription would never be proposed. He was wedded to voluntaryism. When he returned, Australians suspected him of having conscription up his sleeve. There was an outburst of indignation.

Australians charged him with having had his head turned by fawning lords and ladies at "home" and with sidling up to a t.i.tle himself. Australians are not very keen about rank; in that matter they are more like Americans. Hughes nearly committed political suicide by declaring himself in favor of conscription. It is said that he was warned by labor not to try to put it through without a referendum. What happened then illuminates the Australian character.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AUSTRALIA IS NOT ALL DESERT AND PLAIN South Australian Government Photo]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PEOPLE ARE SMALL AMIDST AUSTRALIA'S GIANT TREE FERNS See the group on the rocks at lower right-hand corner Photo from Brown Bros.]

For weeks the country was in as wild a state as pending civil war could produce anywhere. The feeling was tense. Conflicts and wrangling occurred everywhere. Up to the last night of the discussion it seemed as though there would be war. Then came the day of the vote. The quiet and the orderliness was one of the greatest boosts for democracy ever staged. Everything was bathed in sunny restfulness. Workingmen lay upon the gra.s.s of the public domain like seals. When they talked it was about anything but conscription. Conscription lost. It lost a second time the year after. Two main factors stood out against the sending of more men to Europe,--labor and Asia.

Almost immediately after the referendum the coal strike occurred. The situation became grave. To conserve fuel for industrial purposes, the Government prohibited the use of electricity and gas except during specified hours. Places of business on the main streets were lit with kerosene lamps, movies were closed, the ferry stations stood in semi-darkness. People conversed as though certain doom were impending.

Things looked forlorn indeed. Shops and factories were closing down, throwing thousands out of work. One heard remarks about things heading for a revolution.

Australia is reputed to have done wonders in the way of solving the problems of capital and labor, but there are as many strikes in that Commonwealth as in any other state. The country is crystallizing quickly and is bound to become more and more conservative. Despite the worthy democracy to be found there, every public utterance seemed to bear itself as though made by a lord. One is constantly aware of the presence of the crown, even though it has been removed, like the sense of pressure behind one's ears after having taken off one's spectacles. For notwithstanding its democracy, Australia is bound up in the monarchy.

Revolution was hinted at every now and then, but at its mention one also heard the creaking of the bones of empire. It was evident and clear, though hardly spoken. One felt the security which comes from the acc.u.mulation of tradition and custom, but it was not comfortable. Even in Australia change seems to be regarded as synonymous with destruction.

A marvelous structure, this British Empire, and fit for the residence of any human being,--but not an American. He is too dynamic, too restless, too eager for creation.

And here is where we arrive at the point of meeting and of parting in our relations with Australia. America has determined upon keeping the country "white" against the invasion of Asia. So has Australia. But America has the inclusive tendencies of an empire; Australia the exclusive. America is heterogeneous; Australia is h.o.m.ogeneous. American strikes are regarded as importations, but what about the strikes in Australia? America has a population of 110,000,000 in an area but a little larger than Australia, while Australia has only a paltry 4,500,000. America is trying to amalgamate the diverse races it already has without taking in such people as the Asiatics, whose racial characters are so unyielding. But Australia is herself unyielding.

h.o.m.ogeneous as her population is, she has great difficulty in keeping it from disagreement. With a vast region not likely to be touched by labor in generations, Australia uses the same arguments against outsiders coming in as does America in regions already well developed.

Keeping Australia "white" is the keynote of all Australian politics. For this reason half of the leaders waged war against Germany; while to keep Australia white, the other half stayed conscription. Labor is at the bottom of the "white" Australia policy. The most serious problem the country has to face is her insufficient population. Yet what labor is to be found there receives no more consideration than anywhere else in the world. It is no better off than elsewhere. There is less poverty simply because poverty is synonymous with over-population. To protect itself against invasion of cheap (not necessarily Asiatic) labor, Australia pa.s.sed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. To speak of restricting immigration into a country containing only four and a half million seems suicidal, but Australia went at it without any trepidation and declared for the exclusion from "immigration into the Commonwealth ... any person who fails to pa.s.s the dictation test; that is to say, who, when an officer dictates to him not less than fifty words in any prescribed language in the presence of the officer" fails to pa.s.s in the judgment of the immigration officer. This is the crux of the Act; other than that, restriction is placed only on those diseased or incapable. In other words, this restriction places a person failing in the test on a level with the criminal, lunatic, and the leper. It is obviously a snare, for it means that an officer may spring any language he may choose on an immigrant. He may ask a Frenchman to write Greek, or a Greek Spanish, failure to comply giving the officer the power to exclude the applicant. The law has kept Australia white, but with pallor rather than purity.

Veiled and unveiled, this White-Australia policy was at the bottom of the failure of conscription. The spirit which dominated both camps was fear of invasion. Argued the pro-conscriptionist: "If we do not stand behind the empire and the Allies in this war, Prussia or whoever may become her ally in future will swoop down upon us." Argued the anti-conscriptionist: "If that is the danger, then let us keep our men at home to protect us against this possible peril." The antis were more open. They pictured an invasion following the sending of men to Europe, and pointed to the importation of coolies for labor in Europe. One member of Parliament was fined a thousand dollars and made to enter into "cognizance and comply with the provisions of the Regulation" because he specified whom they were afraid of,--j.a.pan. And to add grist to their mill, a hundred natives of the island of Malta (British subjects, mind you) appeared at the beautiful front door of Australia, Sydney Harbor, and asked for admission. They did not land. Even Indians are excluded, a deposit of five hundred dollars being required of any admitted, to guarantee his return. A transport has been fitted out in Java with native labor, but Australian workers refused to load it till the fittings were torn out and done over by Australian labor.

Now, the White-Australia policy is, if you care to stretch a point, a humane attempt to avoid conflict. The Australians say to themselves and to the world: "We would rather call you names across the sea than scratch your eyes or pull your ears over a wooden fence." They point to the American Civil War and the present problem in the South as an example. They wish to save themselves future operations by avoiding the cancer and are willing to bear the burden of r.e.t.a.r.ded development for this promised peace. Let us see how it worked out.

It is interesting to note that in 1915, 890 Germans were admitted to Australia, and only 423 j.a.panese; in 1914, 3,395 Germans and 387 j.a.panese. The number of Germans for the two years previous was virtually the same, whereas that of j.a.panese fluctuated from 698 in 1912 to 822 in 1913, and 387 in 1914. From 1908 to 1915 the Germans entered in increasing numbers, while the j.a.panese decreased. Chinese gained admission in vastly greater number than the j.a.panese, exceeding them by 1,500 and 2,000 yearly. On the whole the preponderance of arrivals over the departure was seldom excessive, most of the steamers from the south bound for the Orient being taken up by returning Asiatics. With the vast regions of the island continent uninhabited and untouched, this movement of Orientals is only evidence of the check the Government keeps on invasion. The fallacy in the White-Australia policy is obvious. Its psychological significance was pointed to above,--a tendency on the part of Australians, though politically democrats, to revert to habits of thought inherited from England. England is an island kingdom, but the Englishman cannot forget this even when he has taken up his home on a vast continent like Australia. In this day and age of steel ships and submarines, with possibilities of the airship clear before us, for any one to think in an insular way is to lack the common sense of a King Canute. Australia has shown that even with an enemy recognized and fought she has been unable to remain unified in thought, yet she thinks that merely by excluding the Asiatic she will be able to maintain her integrity. Capital in Australia would be willing to admit the Oriental in order to reduce the cost of labor; but as soon as he becomes a factor in commerce--as in the case of the Chinese furniture-makers who exploit Chinese laborers and undersell Australian furniture manufacturers--Capital becomes wroth and shouts for the exclusion of the coolie. Labor, on the other hand, swaggering about the brotherhood of man and the common cause of labor throughout the world, becomes just as nationalistic when "foreign" labor threatens to undersell it. True that it would be easy enough to establish a minimum wage by law, so that no Chinese would be allowed to receive less than that wage for his work, but the principle doesn't work out so easily. Even with a minimum wage and an eight-hour day, the Chinese with his intense application to his job and his manner of living would threaten the white man. But have we not the same difficulty even among a given number of white men, where some are ready to undersell others? Australia, the experiment-station for labor legislation, is the last country where one would expect to find the exclusiveness which she condemns so vigorously. She has shown herself exclusive in her discrimination against the English workingman; she has even been exclusive in her att.i.tude toward her neighbor, New Zealand (an exclusiveness, which is reciprocated, of course); and finally and foremost, she is exclusive of Asiatic and colored people.

This exclusiveness has left a continent with barely the fringe of it scratched. To people like the j.a.panese, Chinese and Indians, this must indeed seem the height of selfishness. True, that spa.r.s.e as her population is, Australia has done more to better the condition of her people than has j.a.pan or China; and there is the rub. That mere excessive breeding gives a nation a right to invade other lands is a principle that no decent-minded man could tolerate for a moment. Only people to whom woman is merely a breeding-machine would advance such an argument. And in the chapter on j.a.pan and the Far East I shall elucidate the basic facts in that contention for the elimination of a White-Australia policy.

From the Australian point of view, though admitting that hardships are bound to result, admitting that ethically discrimination is unprogressive, the country is faced by the danger of sheer numbers.

Idealistically the Australian policy is wrong. Individually, those of us who know the j.a.panese and the Chinese would just as soon live next door to them as to any other human beings. But as long as numbers are the racial ideal of the East, there is no solution that would not undermine quality if quality did not defend itself against quant.i.ty. I am ready to admit that there are many Australians who are as inferior to the Chinese as the coolie is to us. But the Australasian has one virtue: he does not breed like the Oriental.

The problem of a.s.similation and Australianization is intricate and sometimes extremely unjust. There is the case of the young Chinese boy born and brought up in Port Darwin, North Australia. In every way he is an Australian citizen. To further his education and westernization, he came to America to study at Harvard, and here fell in love with a Chinese student born in Boston. Now, she is an American citizen. They are to be married. He has every reason for wishing to return to Port Darwin with his wife. But, says the Australian Immigration Law, you can't come in because you're a Chinese. "But I'm an American Citizen, and the wife of an Australian," she argues. "That doesn't matter. We exclude Indians, who are British subjects, from entering Australia, and we intend to exclude you. Australia is the only country in the world in which the white race is still free to expand, and we intend to keep it free for them." "What is America going to do about it?" I asked my informer. "What can she do? The only thing she could do would be to come to a clash of arms with us, and we intend to let the Chinese do their own fighting if they want to. We won't let j.a.panese who are American-born citizens enter Australia; we may seem a bit piggish about it, but we intend to hold to our own nevertheless." This question was up for the British Minister to decide upon, but at the time of writing no decision has yet been arrived at.

That injustice such as the above is bound to result is obvious. But for generations to come the onus rests on the Orientals, and on those white men who would profit by either cheap or untiring laborers whose minds ask for nothing, and whose bodies are content with little.

Though Australia's contribution to the intellectual welfare of the world has as yet been slim, the advance in political and economic thought has been exceedingly worth while. The freedom of the individual to go his way in life, to develop the best that is in him, the standard of general welfare and the quality of life as a whole so far excels the average of Oriental social life that Australasia is justified in trying to prevent the dilution of its concentrated comfort. We all know and admit that both China and j.a.pan have civilizations, intellectual and artistic, the like of which might well be emulated in the West. But beneath it all is the dreadful waste of human life for which China and j.a.pan must give answer before demanding of the West certain physical and material advantages which we have.