Meanwhile the question of Asiatic immigration was gravely complicated by the Vancouver riots of September 7 and 8, in which a mob of 8,000 persons made an organized attack on the Japanese and Chinese quarter of the town. The immediate cause of this outbreak is said to have been the Lieutenant-Governor's refusal to sign the Orientals-Exclusion Measure. But there is no doubt that the trouble had been brewing for months at least, if not for years; and the reported anti-Oriental labour con-spiracles at Seattle which came to light immediately after the Vancouver and Bellingham riots are idence of the particular class in which, throughout the Pacific coast, the grievance is most acutely felt. Following upon the riots there came a land call, not only in British Columbia but also in the rest of Canada, for the denunciation of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and forthe rigorous exclusion of all Japanese. It is a whimsical reflexion that the ability of Canada to send a Commissioner to treitt with the Japanese Government was largely due, as Mr. Rodolphe Lemieux admitted in his farewell speech at Ottawa, to the fact of that Alliance. But it still remains to be seen what course the people of the Dominion will try to force upon its Government, if it should find justification for its present suspicion that Mr. Lemieux's mission is a Looking at the question of Oriental immigration as a whole it is clear that the conflict is not between country and country, but between class and class. Sir Wilfred Laurier's declaration that "Canada is only now beginning to. reap the benefits of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance the concurrence that opinion of the Canadian Manufacturers' Association; the interference of the Supreme Government of the United States for the suspension of the segregation policy in Canada; the telegram which we published but few weeks ago of the reopening of a Japanese employment bureau in San Francisco; these things are evidence that opposition to Asiatic labour centres in the ranks of white labour; while the employers are comparatively indifferent to the colour of their employees provided that they can get not merely the cheapest hands but the very hands themselves for the exploitation of territory which is running to waste for want of workers. The one consideration which lifts this racial antagonism above the sphere of a plain competition of prices, is that in the case of Japan at least, we find ability to produce the brains as well as the labour; and while Japanese immigrants are ousting white workmen in their own countries, white men are being regularly replaced by native managers in the control of Japan's own industries, At the present time, and probably for some time to come, there isa tendency greatly to over-rate the dangers of oriental expansion. At home in repairing the losses of the war, and in Korea, where since the abdication of the old Emperor on July 18 the administration of the country has gradually been removed entirely from native hands, Japan has ample use for all her surplus population. Tha low state of her finances and consequent retrenchment in the 1908 budget are a sufficient guarantee against the aggressive intentions wherewith the forebodings of grisly scaremongers credit her. But the ultimate prospect involving not merely Japanese and Chinese, but also Hindus who evince a growing desire to emigrate in search of work, and coupled with the ability of coloured races to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.