been made are written with the object of urging a policy
of absolute exclusion. This is the remedy, and the only
remedy, which finds favour in the United States, in
British Columbia, in Australia, and in South Africa.
There is probably no question on which the people of
those countries are so nearly unanimous. The White
Australia doctrine,' says one Australian writer, 'is based
on the necessity for choosing between national existence
and suicide.' Another says, 'Australians of all classes
and political affiliations regard the [exclusion] policy
much as Americans regard the Constitution.' 'Take
down the barriers on the Pacific Coast, and there
would be ten million Hindus in Canada in ten years.'
A Californian echoes this Canadian protest:
'The
multitudes of Asia are awake after their long sleep, as
the multitudes of Europe were when our present flood of
immigration began. We know what would happen on
the Asiatic side, by what did happen on the European
side. Against Asiatic immigration we could not survive.'
And so a policy, which is rather time-discredited than
time-honoured, is to be adopted, to preserve the white
man in his half-empty Garden of Eden. As the Baby-
lonians built the so-called Median Wall to keep out the
roving nomads from the North, as the Chinese built their
wonderful Great Wall to keep out the Tartars, as the
Romans carried a line of fortifications from Newcastle to
the Solway, so the white man is to erect a permanent
barrier to exclude the Asiatic. All the under-populated
countries are in the hands of the whites, and the overflow
of China, Japan, and India is never to be allowed to reach
them.

Is it likely that this policy will be successful? To begin with, it has all the well-known drawbacks of a protective system. In the protected countries the cost of living is forced up, and the consumer is deprived of the advantage which he might have gained from competition, in all trades where the home labourer can determine prices. Under this system the cost of labour has become so high that much of the wealth in the protected countries remains undeveloped. In the State of New York, and in other parts of the Union, the visitor is surprised to see many derelict farms. The explanation is that the cost of labour is so great that it pays to Vol. 285.-No. 467.

R

cultivate only the best land. Further west, magnificent crops of fruit rot on the trees; there is no one to pick them. The slow growth of Australia and New Zealand is the result of the absence of cheap labour. In our own country an impasse has plainly been reached. Unemployment is increasing, and must increase much further. No houses can be built for rents which the occupants could pay. The high cost of coal impoverishes the population and cripples all industries. The Government has no remedy except to endow the unemployed out of the taxes and to build houses out of the rates; though it must be clear even to the least intelligent member of the least intelligent House of Commons that has ever sat that every five pounds so spent drives another workman out of employment for a week. Quite apart from Asiatic competition, our social order is on the verge of bankruptcy. By a well-known law of nature, a nation shielded from healthy competition becomes more and more inefficient, and less able to stand against its rivals when the protecting barriers fail.

As the conditions in the white countries become more and more unfavourable to enterprise, we may be sure that both capital and business ability will be transferred to the economically strong countries. Asia will be industrialised; India and China and Japan will be full of factories, equipped with all the latest improvements, and under skilled management, which at first will be frequently white. Wealth will be so abundant in Asia that the Governments will be able without difficulty to maintain fleets and armies large enough to protect their own interests, and to exact reparation for any transgressions of international law by the whites. Only a wealthy country can be powerful by sea; and a nation which has lost most of its foreign trade will not think it worth while to bid for naval supremacy. The policy of exclusion will, therefore, be powerless to prevent those races which possess economic superiority from increasing in wealth and then in military power.

The suicidal war which devastated the world of the white man for four years will probably be found to have produced its chief results, not in altering the balance of power in Europe, but in precipitating certain changes which were coming about slowly during the peace. The

period which these changes would naturally have occupied was shortened by perhaps fifty years. The first of these is the change in the relation of wages to output, which has been suddenly and enormously altered to the detriment of the manufacturer and the consumer, as the result of the war. The white workman can now live only under sheltered and privileged conditions. In England he is living on the remains of the old wealth of the country, which, as we are beginning to discover, has been almost entirely destroyed under the present Government. The second change is the transference of political and financial supremacy from Europe to the United States, a change which was no doubt bound to occur within half a century, since America has a decisive advantage in her geographical position, equally adapted for the Pacific and the Atlantic trade. The present writer, when he was at Berlin two or three years before the war, had a conversation with a leading German publicist, and endeavoured to impress upon him that in the event of a European war, the American would inevitably be the tertius gaudens. The argument, though absolutely sound, as the event has proved, was not very well received. Europe has thrown away her last halfcentury of primacy. The third change is that to which this article is directed. The peril from the coloured races, which before the war loomed in the distance, is now of immediate urgency. The white peoples, exhausted and crippled by debt, will be less than ever able to

compete with Asia.

The policy of exclusion, however, must be considered as it affects the white nations separately, for the problem is not the same all over the world. In North America it is probable that the immigration of Chinese, Japanese, and Indians may be successfully resisted. Employers of labour may complain with good reason that they are unable to develop their businesses; but the labour vote will be far too strong for them. The Americans are beginning to realise that their promiscuous hospitality to immigrants, even from Europe, has fatally impaired the racial integrity of their nation, and has been accompanied by a great reduction in the birth-rate of the old Americans of Anglo-Saxon and Dutch stock. Only in

the South, where the blacks are kept in a semi-servile condition, are the white families still large. The new policy, it is plain, will be one of America for the Americans'; Europeans as well as Asiatics will find the land of freedom hard to enter. But Central and South America are not likely to remain barred to the yellow race. The Latin Americans have very little colour prejudice; and there is a far-away kinship between the Mongols and the so-called red men, which makes racial admixture between them by no means repugnant. Central and South America are potentially very rich; and the greater part of the continent is too hot for Europeans, but not for Chinese. The Germans in South Brazil have lost their vigour; like our countrymen in South Africa, they sit under a tree and hire a coloured man to work for them. But the Chinaman can work in worse climates than that of South Brazil.

The Australians, as we have already seen from their own writings, are fully aware that for them exclusion of the Asiatic is a matter of life and death. But will five million white men be able to guard an empty continent nearly as large as the United States? They could count on no foreign help, except possibly from America; for the mother-country is far too much exhausted to wage another great war in this century. They might save themselves by rescinding all trade union regulations, and offering homes on easy terms to competent workmen and their families from all parts of Europe. The resources of the country would then be rapidly developed, and the population might in thirty years be numerous enough to keep the invader out. But no policy of this kind is to be expected. The Australian working-man will vote for keeping his prize to himself, till the dykes burst and that splendid country falls to a hardier and thriftier race. As for the other great islands near South-East Asia, it is almost certain that they will become Chinese. It is also probable that this race will spread over Central Asia, where there are said to be large tracts of fairly good land still nearly empty.

In South Africa the danger is more from the Kaffir than from the East Indian or Chinaman. The Bantus are a fine race, and it has yet to be proved that they are incapable of civilisation. The African has at all times

and in all places, except in our West Indies, met with abominable treatment. Everything has been done to degrade him and ruin his character. Mr Stephen Graham's book about The Children of the Slaves' in the Southern States of the American Union makes an Englishman's blood boil. It is not easy to forget the horrible photograph of a negro burnt alive by a crowd of white savages. Even in South Africa the Kaffir has much to complain of; and the evidence of those who know the country is that the relations between the two races are growing worse instead of better. The future of that Dominion is problematical; but it does not seem likely that it will ever be a white man's country like Canada or New Zealand.

For us at home the problem is different. We are not threatened by coloured immigration, and we have nothing to fear from the armies and fleets of Asia. But we depend for our very existence on our foreign tradethat is to say, on being able to offer our manufactures to other nations at a price which they are willing to accept. In return for these manufactures we import the food on which we live. If we can no longer sell them, we shall get no food, and we shall starve. This is a childishly simple proposition, but a large section of our politicians and social reformers choose to ignore it. A double movement, combining decrease in production with increase in its cost, has been progressing rapidly, and many seem to view it with complacency. Its effects would have shown themselves earlier but for the disorganisation of industrial life on the Continent. The crash of our factitious prosperity has now begun; the warfortunes are melting away like snow.

The criticism may be made that these arguments prove too much. If the cheaper races must always outwork and underlive the more expensive, why have China and India remained poor; and what is the use of warning us against a fate which we cannot possibly escape, since we cannot lower our standard to that of the Chinese or the Hindu? The answer to the former objection is not difficult. Agricultural Asia is overpopulated and can only just feed itself. The low standard of living has increased the population to the