PRINCE CHING.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXI, Issue 210, 4 September 1900, Page 5

PRINCE CHING.

HONGKONG, September 3. Prince Ching is willing to return

to Pekin if guaranteed his liberty.

"DO UNTO OTHERS."

HOW WE INVITE THE CHINESE WITHIN THE PALE OF CIVILISATION.

ONE-SIDED EECIPKOCITY,

(From Our Special Correspondent.)

LONDON, July 27,

"We should grasp the chance °f eilr. forcing our right to be treated by the Chinese as we treat them. Must not the Chinese be compelled to come within the pale of. civilisation? They have not voluntarily come within the comity of nations. Must they not ,be i forced to?" These sentences, in a letter from Captain F. E. Younghusband to the "Times," are . the text upon which the Manchester "Guardian" preaches a severe sermon upon the way we treat the Chinese when. we come into contact with them, and the way we. invite them to "come within the pale of civilisation and-the comity of nations." Almost everywhere "-we try? and for the last thirty years have been trying, particularly hard, to keep j

them off our soil.Some of the Australian colonies have put a poll-tax ou Chinese immigrants. Others forbid their entry so strictly that Chinese seamen cannot go ashore for an hour in an Australian port. The New Zealand Government passed a Public Health Act in 1888 by which every place in the colony with Chinese in it was to be treated as infected with small-pox and put under quarantine. The United States began to warn Chinese la.bourers off American soil in 1882, and took very stringent steps in 1892 to ensure their going. In Canada and in British Columbia the law has been used to keep Chinamen ' out. That, then, briefly, is how we "treat the Chinese." But when it is argued that we must "enforce our right to be treated by the Chinese as we treat them," we think it can scarcely be meant that we should enforce the right oi! Englishmen living in China to be subjected to a poll-tax, or to be expelled at sight, or to be turned back at the gangways of inward-bound ships in Chinese ports, or to be treated as sufferers, by virtue of their nationality, from loathsome disease. And yet what other sense can we give to the words?

The "Guardian" proceeds to quote Mr McMillan, the free-trade leader in N.S.W., and Sir Henry Parkes, to show Australian feeling against Chinese Immigration, and continues: "We have here the figure of Australia beckoning China into the pale of civilisation.- One statesman says that she is too remotely alien to be touched; another that she is too highly civilised in her own way to be touched safely. Meanwhile China goes on her way, morose and Inscrutable, until, baited into savage fury by much hustling and small larceny, she turns like a maddened beast and kills blindly to right ana le-f t." . . . As far as America and

the British colonies want anything in the matter, they want to make the Chinese stay at home themselves and let us come into China at the same timei They feel that China and the Chinese ought to be more lived on by other people and live on other people less —that, instead of spilling- floods of cheap labour over a great part of the .world, China ought to keep it at home and make it buy its betters' wares. Their feeling is much more nearly expressed, by one sentence of Captain Youugb.usband's—"The earth is too small; the portion of it the Chinese occupy is too big and too rich"—than by any other. They have not the slightest desire to bring China into any pale, literal or metaphorical, which contains themselves. They do not want to live in any particular state of comity with her. They would be shocked at the idea of the reciprocity of treatment which the-phrase "comity of'nations" implies. The "Guardian" concludes by point- ! ing out that reia'ibution for the mur- ( der of foreigners is a thing "for which j States are bound to exact full satis- | faction, whatever the relations beI tjween offender and sufferer in other i respects. Whatever we do, let us j I'teep that question distinct ia our 1 ittinds from the question, of excuses or 'means for satisfying the general appetit,e of the civilized world for China's belcmg-ings. It is all the more desirable, .because in such quasi-judicial matters as the exacting of retribution for gross international outrage anything like a snuffle in t;he voice of the judicial authorities is intolerable, and there is an unmistakeable snuffle in the delivery of all this talk about drawing- China" into "the comity of nations," because her territory is "too big and too' rich" in th'fi opinion of others who want it. The civilized Powers owe it.to. the memory of their citizens murdered in China that no trace of the cant used during the intrigues and filcliings orf the last few years should, if "possible, mar the proceedings directly necessitated by their tragic death. ' The Agent-General for New 'Zealand wrote pointing out that the N.Z. Government passed no such act in 1888 as that menrtfioned, to which the "Guardian" replied, by a footnote quoting the IS9O edition "of Sir Charles Dilke's "Problems of Greater Britain." "The Government of New Zealand has exceeded all others in the high-handed character of ite action' ag-ainst the Chinese. It reprinted without change and put In force in 1888 a proclamation by Sir Arthur Gordon, dated 1881, under the Public Health Act, declaring all places where there is a Chinese population infected with _ the smallpox, and imposing quarantine upon all persons coming from them or having received any person coming from them " • We much regret the error kindly pointed out by Mr Eeeves in our statement of these facts—an error which, it will fre1 seen, does not; impair the validity of tM' conclusion we drew regarding- the attitude of New Zealand.—Ed. "Guardian." ,

It is of course impossible to run the risk of flooding Australasia with Chinese cheap labour, but it cannot be denied that there is something- paradoxical in the European treatment of the Chinese question. ';

The twentieth centuTJ win find not only a Yellow peril, bi it in all probability a Black peril l\s well. _ The Pan-African congress n^w sitting in London -demands equal ." rights for blacks and whites, and in view of the large native population in .Africa and AmericaTand the fecundity of Black •arid"; Yellow, the white mi. vn m the years tio come will find it a iiard task to reconcile Justice and Sel Preservation.