Belding banner. (Belding, Mich.) 1889-1918, 1908-06-18
IN BATTLE OF LIFE
MATTER OF DIET is MOST IMPoR.
TANT FEATURE.
In Consequence the Asiatic, with His
Diversified Feeding, Has Manifest
Superiority Over the White
Races Of the Earth.

A conspicuous factor in the bat
tie of life is omnivorousness, or di-
versity of feeding. That animal which
has but a single plant, for instance,
which ii can use for food, may be an
initiated by frost or grub or any other
cause which would remove the plant
for a single season, says a writer in
the Pacific Era. That which feeds in.
discriminatory on all plants will find
abundant sustenance under more ad-
verse circumstances. That whose
stomach receives vegetable or animal
food with equal favor has a still bet
ter chance for surviving; and that
which can catch the most various sort
of prey is more apt to have prey al
ways at its command than that whose
powers in chase, whose courage or
whose strength can overtake or over
come only the most slow-moving or
weakest animals. Man, the most per-
feet of animals, and the one who in the
present conditions of the earth could
survive all others, has attained to
his position of mastery largely be-
cause he is, of all animals, the most
omnivorous.
OF all the varieties of man the
Asiatic, and especially the Chinaman,
is most diverse in his food. All is
meat to him-animal or vegetable, in
the air, on the earth or in the waters
under the earth. He can gorge him
self with joy on the abundant meat
diet of the Englishman; he can dine
comfortably and happily upon a brace
of mice, or exc out life for weeks
upon a few handfuls of rice. And all
the time he can work without ceas-
ing. He can pack more of his kind
upon an acre of ground than any New
York tenement life can show, and live
there in what he regards as tolerable
comfort In this he has precisely the
same advantage over the white man
as the European had over the original
inhabitants of this country, and as the
Englishman had over the natives of
Australia.
1t is really, therefore, those char
acteristics of the Asiatic which we
most despise, and which we regard as
constituting his inferiority to ourselves
his miserable little figure, his
pinched and wretched way of living,
his slavish and tireless industry, his
indifference to high and costly pleas
ures which our habit of generations
almost makes necessities, his capacity
to live in swarms in wretched dens
where the white man would rot if he
did not suffocate-all these make him
most formidable rival for ultimate
survival of the fittest.
| Our ancestors emerged from the
broad and roomy environment OF pas
toral and savage life only few cen
turtles ago, and our DEMONSTRATING fac
ulties represent what has been stored
up by heredity in the period which
has since elapsed. The eastern
Asiatic emerged from these condi-
tons at a period so remote that no
human record or tradition can be
found so old as to refer to a time
when China and India were not too
populous for the conditions of savage
life. The accumulated experience of
countless ages is, therefore, stored up
in the Asiatic's food getting and food.
saving capacity, and those ages prop.
erly and fairly represent his superior
ity over us in the battle for the sur
vival Of the fittest, if that battle is to
be fought in a fair field with no favor
in open and undisturbed competition