Watertown republican. [volume] (Watertown, Wis.) 1860-1906, 1884-02-13
MONGOL MIGRATION.
The Great Problem of the Future


prof. Felix L. Oswald in Cincinnati Enquirer.l
But the worst rock on the horizon of
the future is the Mongol emigration
problem. It is a lee-shore reef that
cannot be avoided and we trust to luck
and pluck to steer our ship through its
breakers. China has long reached her
practical maximum of populousness,
and nature has repeatedly removed the
surplus by her merciless corrective
epidemic famine. The hunger year fol-
lowing the civil war Of 1863 subtracted
at Least 100000, the long drought of
1875 and 1876 about 3,500,000 In the
province of King-Soo towns and whole
districts were entirely abandoned The
home Government of a country like
that could never prevent mass emigra-.
tion if the effluent channel had once
burst its sluices; they might as well try
to stop the exodus from an over
stocked ant-hill Another drought or
two, another inroad of the West-Tar-
tars and the least encouragement from
the trans-P Pacific side, and that exodus
will soon become pandemic, ans every
Western breeze would cover our shores
with additional legions of an endless
Monaghan locust swarm. A wal of
races might fail to cure the evils of such
an invasion. Have we the right to pre-
vent them? Whatever political yicissi-
tudes future may have in store for the
United States, it is certain that for cen
turtles to come this country must re-
main the home Of the progressive races.
"a boat manned with picked crew,
field to be sowed with the winnOwed
wheat Of the Old World, an arena sa-
cred to the republican principle: "La
carriere ouverte aux talents" What
chance beyond the mercy Of coolie
slave-dealer have the dregs of an East
Asiatic despotism in such a country
the fossils of a petrifed nation IN land
of restless progress? There is no hope
for them. The asthenia of the Chinese.
race is not the weakness Of infancy, but
the debility of old age Faculties which
are only dormant in other nations have
become extinct in their souls; they
are injurious rather than ignorant,
slaves without the love of liberty, not
coward1y only, but devoid of the in
stincts which may stimulate even a
craven to heroic deeds, and unmanly to
that hopeless degree which begets in
difference to personal shame and per-
sonaI pollution. To praise their indus
try is making a virtue of dire necessity,
for, in an over-populated country like
theirs, death by starvation is the inexor-
able alternative, and the laziness of the
wealthy Chinaman combines the mental
sloth of the opulent Turk with the ply
steal Incidence of the aristocratic ItaI-
ian.
Their torpor might be ascribed to
the paralyzing influence of the despot-
ism, 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 develops vices as well as vir-
tues. The emancipation from the con-
troll Of their home-rulers, which de-
veloped the British emigrants' talents
for seIf-gOvernment and industrial en-
terprise, gave the same free scope to.
the cruelty and anarchial tendencies of
the Spanish colonist, and would only
emancipate the evil passions of many
Oriental nations. The modern Greeks
would value our sparsely-settled mount
aims, chiefly from bandits point of
view. Malay emigrants would only
run amuck over larger territory, and
their Monaghan neighbors would give
free rein to vices which only their alb
ject poverty and the draconic code of
their native legislators can now partly
restrain.
Their standards of human merit are
too different from ours to admit special
comparisons, but the fact remains that
during the past 500 years and under
the spur of close competition for the
barest necessities of life, a nation Of
300, 900, 900 souls has not added a sin
gle important fact to the store Of hui
man knowledge, has not produced
single great poet, philosopher or in
ventor, nor social reformer, nor even
a great military genius; and the fact
remains that vices which only reared
their heads among the prodigies which
presaged the downfall of the most cor
ruptWestern nations have fourished in
China for centuries like mushrooms in
a pestilential swamp, and In their cities,
as we'll as in their remote rural districts,
the ostracism of public opinion has
ceased to be a check on moral infamy
of any kind.