From the time of my first visit to Australia the laboring men had been conducting an anti-Chinese agitation, to perpetuate and strengthen their power over capital. There were not then, nor are there now, nearly enough workers in the country to supply the demand. The native blacks are without question the laziest people under the sun. The notoriously indolent West Indian negro is an enterprising and ambitious citizen by comparison with them, for there is no power on earth by which they can be made to work. The Chinese, always on the lookout for a labor market, soon heard of the rich field and invaded it in droves, whereupon the white workmen of all grades set up a great hullabaloo; it was there I first heard the cry of the “Yellow Peril.” The employers, fearful of antagonizing their employees, either joined with them or let them have their own way. They urged England to put a stop to the importation of Chinese and when the mother country, which was extending its “sphere of influence” (meaning thereby the acquisition of territory) further and further into the Celestial Empire, declined to act, Victoria and New South Wales took the matter into their own hands and passed a Chinese exclusion law. It provided that any ship captain who brought Chinese into these Provinces should be compelled to return them, forfeit his certificate, and pay a fine of not more than three hundred pounds for each “Chinkie,” and he might also be sent to jail. Chinese were further prohibited from entering the restricted districts by the overland route, and while it was impossible to entirely shut them out, it was thought the new law would greatly reduce the number that entered the country. It occurred to me that I might recoup my mining losses by importing Chinamen, without running any considerable risk of arrest, and I went into the business. It promised to be profitable, for the natural effect of the exclusion law was to intensify the desire of the “Chinkies” to get into the two Provinces, where the demand for them was the greater on account of their restricted number. I bought the old mission ship “Southern Cross,” which took Bishop Selwyn to Australia, a fore and aft schooner of about two hundred tons, and sent her across the bay to Balmain to be overhauled and put in shape for her new purpose. I had her fitted up as a private yacht, but all of her fittings below decks were so arranged that they could be knocked down and stored away, leaving the hold open. On the first trip to China I had tiers and rows of berths built on the same quickly removable principle, and with this arrangement there was enough space to enable us to carry more than two hundred passengers without discomfort.