Northwest enterprise. [volume] (Anacortes, Wash. Ter.) 1882-1887, 1883-06-23
THE MONGOLTANS.
Some Startling Facts Relative to Chinese
Immigration to this Coast and Hts Ef.
fects on the Community.

feCtS on the community.
The worst rock on the horizon OF
the future is the Mongol immigration
problem. 1t is lee shore reef that
cannot be avoided, and we must trust
to luck and pluck to steer our ship
through its breakers. China has
long reached her practical maximum
of populousness, and nature has re-
peatedly removed the surplus by her
merciless corrective, epidemic famine
The hunger year following the civil
war of 1868 subtracted at least 2,0O0,-
600, the long drought Of 1856 about
100000. In the province OF Kiang-
500, town and whole districts were
entirely abandoned. The home gov
ernment of country like that could
never prevent a mass emigration il
the aflluent channel had once burst
its sluices; they might as well try to
stop the exodus from an overstocked
ant hill. Another drought or two,
another inroad of the West Tartars,
and the least encouragement from
the transpacitic side, and that exodus
would soon become pandemic, and
every western breeze would cover our
shores with additional legions of an
endless Mongolian locust-swarm. A
war of races might fail to cure the
evils of such an invasion. Have we
right to prevent them? Whatever
political vicissitudes futurity may
have in store for the United States,
it is certain that for centuries to come
this country must remain the home OF
the progressive races; boat manned
with q picked crew, field to be sown
with the winnowed wheat Of the old
world, an arena sacred to the repub
lican principle: LA cd,riere ouUerte
aur talents" What chance beyond
the mercy of a coolie-slave dealer
have tho dregs of an East Asiatic
dospotism in such a country, tho f0s
sils of a petrified nation in land Of
restless progress! There is no hope
for them. The dsthenia of tho Chi
nese race is not the weakness of in
fancy, but the debility OF old age.
Faculties which are only dormant in
other nations have become extinct in
their souls; they are incwious rather
than ignorant, slaves without the love
of liberty, not cowardly only, but de-
void OF the instincts whichImay stimu-
late oven craven to heroic deeds,
and .unmanly to that hopeless degree
which begets indifference to personal
shame and personal pollution. To
praise their industry is making a
virtue of dire necessity, for in an
over-populated country like theirs
death is the inexorable alternative,
and tho laziness of the wealthy Chi
naman combines the mental sloth of
the opulent Turk with the physical
Incidence of the aristocratic italian.
Their terror might be ascribed to
the paralyzing influence OF despotism,
but the conclusion that they could be
reclaimed by liberty would be wholly
gratuitous. Prisoners, not invalids.
can be benefited by open gates, and
liberty developes vices as well as vir-
tues. The emancipation from the
control of their home rulers. which
developed the British emigrants' tai
ents for self-government and indus
trial enterprise, gave the same free
scope to the cruelty and anarchical
tendencies of the Spanish colonist,
and would only emancipate the evil
passions of many Oriental nations.
The modern Greeks would value our
sparsely settled mountain regions
chiefly from a bandits point OF view.
Malay emigranis would only run
amuck over a larger territory, and
their Mongolian neighbors would
give free rein to vices which only
their abject poverty and the draconic
code of their native Legislators can
now partly restrain.
Their standards OF human merits are
too different from ours to admit OF
special comparisons, but the fact re-
mains that during the last 500 years
and under tho spur OF close competi-
tion for the barest necessities of life,
nation of 800, 900 souls has not ad-
ded a single important fact to the
store OF human knowledge; has not
produced o single great poet. philos-
opher or inventor, nor a social re-
former, nor even great military
genius; and the fact remains that
vices which only reared their heads
among the prodigies which presaged
the downfall OF the most corrupt
western nations have fourished in
China for centuries like mushrooms
in a pestilential swamp, and in their
cities, as well as in their remote rural
districts, the ostracism OF public
opinion has ceased to be a check on
moral infamy OF any kind.