EXCLUDING ALIENS.

MR. REEVES IN DEFENCE.

(From our Special Correspondent.)

London, December 6, 1901.

"The Exclusion of Aliens and Undesirables from Australia and New Zealand" is the subject of a 20-page article written in the most judicial spirit by the Hon. W. P. Reeves, and appearing in the December number or the "National Review." He begins by calling attention to the mainly British stock of Australasia, and its freedom from troubles bred elsewhere by diversities of race, language, and religion. Its two immigration problems are "the inflow of colored aliens" and "the nuisance caused by the European practice of shooting moral and physical rubbish into young countries as though these were made to be treated like waste plots of ground in the environs of cities where sanitary arrangements are primitive." Mr. Reeves then gives a valuable history of the restriction of Chinese immigration, incidentally remarking, apropos of the decision in Chun Teoug Toy versus Musgrove, that no alien, however hardly used, has any remedy at law against a colony that prohibits his entry, that "the colonies owe their victory, not to any Law court of their own—for the Supreme Court of Victoria decided against them—but to the English Privy Council, the Imperial Court, from which they have been lately trying to cut themselves off."

The definite policy of the Colonial Office towards colonial restriction laws is expounded by Mr. Reeves. Immigrants are to be judged less by race and color than by quality. A common form, showing the kind of Act which Downing-street is prepared to agree to, is found in the Natal Restriction Act of 1897, the immediate object of which was to check the flow of coolies from British India. It effects this by excluding—(a) Any person who, when asked, fails to write in some European language an application for admission to the colony; (b) a pauper or person likely to become a public charge: (c) an idiot or lunatic; (d) any person suffering from a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease; (e) anyone who has within two years before arrival been convicted of a serious non-political offence; (f) a prostitute or person living on the earnings of prostitution. The Natal Act the colonial Premiers at the Jubilee Conference of 1897 accepted as the basis of future laws.

After showing how the antipodean colonies have legislated in their own fashion on the Natal model, Mr. Reeves tackles the kanaka question with an admirable freedom from partisanship. He considers that the labor traffic to-day probably shows as few abuses as any system can under which the labor of savage and inferior tribes is exploited by a stronger race, and believes that the work in the sugar plantations, though highly trying, can yet be done by white men better than it is done to-day by the kanakas. As Queensland has allowed the sugar industry to grow up leaning on the black labor, the planters have a strong case when they urge that a sudden expulsion of the islanders might ruin them. Mr. Reeves sees, however, that there will be no black blot on the map of Australia, and, writing before the Barton Government's Customs proposals were made known, finds a way out of the entanglement in an import duty on sugar high enough to secure the Australian market for the sugar planters, and to enable them to tide over the troublesome business of gradually filling the kanakas' places with competent white labor and labor-saving machinery.

The objections to colored immigrants. Mr. Reeves thus sums up:—"Dark races living among whites either blend with them or do not. Where, as in the United States, the two colors do not blend, the result is a miserable state of loathing, hatred, and fear, on the heels of which come problems, political and social, for which the wit of man has yet found no solution. Where, as in South and Central America, the white and dark races do mingle, the product is a mongrel and degraded people, by no means fitted for free self-government. The choice therefore lies between a condition in which the land is occupied by two sullen and separate camps, or one in which the purity and full efficiency of the superior race is destroyed."

The problem furnished by the undesirable immigrant (the embezzler, the drunkard or gambler, the lunatic, the consumptive), is then described. Mr. Reeves feels the difficulty in a severely exclusive law. but says it is certain that by the logic of hard facts the colonies are being forced to follow America's example. As to the pauper, Mr Reeves puts the argument thus— Socialistic democracies have a right to select with care those whom they take into partnership. "The prime object of the Labor parties must be so to shape laws and policy that 'work for all' shall no longer be an ideal and a dream, but a tangible reality. If, however, as fast as this is done, the natural migratory law of population defeats the reformers, their task will be hopeless "

Mr. Reeves concludes by declaring that if the conditions of modern industry are to be regulated at all, the so called "law " of supply and demand must not be allowed to override everything, and that he sees ''no more unreason in trying to protect a country from possible inroads of destitution than in trying to interfere with unrestricted competition in factories, with sweating, with child labor, with truck, with adulteration, with the employment of colored labor, or with any other of the bad influences which tend to lower the standard of comfort."

The Advertiser 7 January 1902,

[I'd say Brazil and Argentina have given the lie to this odious diatribe from a special racist correspondent.]