Chinese Exclusion

THE IMPORTATION OF CHINESE –

            An Ottawa dispatch reads: “Advices from British Columbia are to the effect that great excitement exists there among the white laborers over the refusal of the Dominion government at the last session to adopt legislation restricting the immigration of Chinese laborers.  Chinese arrive in hundreds by every steamer from Hong Kong, and though hundreds make their escape across the boundary line into the United States, a considerable number remain in the Pacific province.  The presence of a battery at Victoria and the militia on the mainland is said to have prevented riots which otherwise would have occurred within the last few months.  A bill is now before the British Columbia legislature making it illegal to employ Chinese in coal mines.  “While the dispatch is not literally true, there is, no doubt, a strong feeling in this province against the continued importation of Chinese, an importation that is in no way beneficial to the province at large.  Why should thousands of these undesirable people be permitted to land on our shores?  Would they be permitted to land if their presence did not advance the interests of the Canadian Pacific and a few large employers of labor?  Their emigration is encouraged by the Canadian Pacific so that its steamships between Vancouver and China may do a profitable business and by large employers of labor so that they can use them as a club against white labor.  Only last summer the owners of a line of steamers operating in inland British Columbia threatened that if they could not get wood cut for a certain sum per cord (about one-half the rate paid by a rival line) that they would bring in Chinese to cut the wood.  The Chinese thus make the rate of wages paid whites, and it is not to be wondered at that the latter object to the Chinese invasion.  Here in the Kootenay Lake country hundreds of Chinese were brought in to work on the Columbia & Kootenay branch of the Canadian Pacific, and while all the white laborers brought in for the same work were given transportation out, the Chinese who have not smuggled themselves across the border are yet in our midst, an ever-present menace to free white labor.  Truly, it is a noble work that the Great Canadian Pacific Railway Company is engaged in – a company, too, that owes its existence to the generosity  of the people of Canada – that of impoverishing the white laborers of a province of the Dominion and aiding and abetting the violation of the laws of a neighboring and friendly nation.