At the outset the theoretical possibility of such a development must be
admitted, though the practical danger will be found to be not serious,
since it can be met by simple precautions. There are several familiar
instances in European history of a nation being defeated first in the
industrial or commercial arena, and then, as an inevitable sequel,
falling behind in the rivalry of war fleets and armies. In the Pacific
there may be seen some facts illustrating the process. The Malay
Peninsula, for instance, is becoming rapidly a Chinese instead of a
Malay Colony of Great Britain. In the old days the Malays, instinctively
hostile to the superior industry and superior trading skill of the
Chinese, kept out Chinese immigrants at the point of the kris. With the
British overlordship the Chinaman has a fair field, and he peacefully
penetrates the peninsula, ousting the original inhabitants. In Fiji,
again, Hindoo coolies have been imported by the sugar-planters to take
the place of the capricious Fijian worker. Superior industry and
superior trading skill tell, and the future fate of Fiji is to be an
Indian colony with White overseers, the Fijian race vanishing.
In both these instances, however, the dispossessed race is a coloured
one. Could a White Race be ousted from a land in the same way, presuming
that the White Race is superior and not inferior? Without doubt, yes, if
the coloured race were allowed ingress, for they would instil into the
veins of the White community the same subtle poison as would a slave
class. The people of every land which comes into close contact with the
Asiatic peoples of the West Pacific littoral know this, and in all the
White communities of the ocean there is a jealousy and fear of Asiatic
colonisation. The British colonies in the Pacific, in particular, are
determined not to admit the Asiatic races within their border. That
determination was ascribed by a British Colonial Secretary of a past era
as due to "an industrial reason and a trade union reason, the
determination that a country having been won by the efforts and the
struggle of a White Race and rescued from barbarism should not be made
the ground of competition by men who had not been engaged in that
struggle." But I prefer to think that the reason lies deeper than the
fear of cheaper labour. It springs rather from the consciousness that a
higher race cannot live side by side with a lower race and preserve its
national type. If the labouring classes have always been in the van of
anti-Asiatic movements in the White colonies of the Pacific, it is
because the labouring classes have come first into contact with the
evils of Asiatic colonisation. It is now some years since I first put
forward as the real basis of the "White Australia" policy "the instinct
against race-mixture which Nature has implanted in man to promote her
work of evolution." That view was quoted by Mr Richard Jebb in his
valuable _Studies in Colonial Nationalism_, and at once it won some
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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