THE TURN OF THE TIDE.

Manawatu Times, Volume LXIV, Issue 284, 9 December 1907, Page 4

THE TURN OF THE TIDE.

There is a curiously interesting cable in our issue of to-day which tells how 200,000 workers have returned to Europe from the United States, and 100,000 artisans who intended to proceed there have decided to remain in Europe. The financial crisis has for the time being seriously shaken industry~in America and it will take some time before confidence is restored and investors tree capital so that expansion may be resumed. The weird tactics of the stock exploiters, combined with the exposures of their methods, has made the small, investors who, after all, contribute a large share of a nation's working capital, shy, while the millionaires have their hands full at present—and some of them are not

quite as pure whether they are millionaires as they were a few months back. Apart from this immediate financial situation the reflux of workers is part of a phenomena that has been developing, unnoticed by the cable agents, for some time past While we have been hearing of a great deal of the noisy objections of certain of the Union Leaders in San Francisco and Vancouver to.Japar nese immigration there has been growing up a quieter, but stranger and more significant movement in the Eastern and middle States against the continued flooding of the country with immigrants from Southern and Eastern, especially South-Eastern, Europe. It is feared that the great digestive machinery of even the United States was beiug overtaxed, and the Italian Government has been greatly concerned as to what to do with its surplus population which is being checked from its former free entry iuto America by vigorous enforcement of the Jaws regulating the transport of immigrants and their reception. At the same time the powerful and numerous body of fruit growers of California, who since they lost the Chinese' have been increasingly anxious to get them back, have refused to assist in the movement against the Japanese now representing their only available harvesting and canning labor. The reason that the fruit growers preferred the Chinese to the Japanese was that the former were a more docile labor, contented with their lot, and wage, and seldom attempting to oust the' white em j ployers.

AUSTRALASIA'S TUBN NEXT,

The Japanese workers, on the other hand, are well organised, act unitedly under leaders, fear neither white man nor devil, and wherever they move are followed by their own large business firms so that the white finds himself at once dependent on the labor they can supply, faced by the gradual assumption by the Japanese directors of the larger businesses, and with the Japanese so intent on "bettering themselves" that they aro always aspiring for higher and more lucrative jobs. For them there is not the sublime content with the world as it is. which is so striking a characteristic if Chinese philosophy. The situation is further illustrated by another cablegram which we publish in *his issue, and which shows that the Californian fruit growers have just petitioned Congress to re-admit Chinese and Japanese, but especially Chinese. And at the conference which decided this one speaker declared that the greater danger to the States was in tbe European immigration regarding which we eet out to write. This item brings us back to the original position, and its application to Australasia. Some little time ago there was a proposition that famine stricken Italian agriculturalists should be transferred to the Northern Territory of Australia, there to found settlements in a climate similar in many respects to that which they would leave. That scheme fell through, but we find the Italian authorities faced by the reflux and the certainty of an unemployed difficulty, reviving it. Probably it would be a good thing for all parties, for the Northern Territory jnust be occupied and these men would make suitable settlers for welding into the Commonwealth. But one thing is certain. The turn-, i ing of the tide from the United \ States and Canada means that it will turn to Australasia, and we ! will 'presently have our emigrant ships coming filled with the stream of humanity that would under other oircumstances have crossed the Atlantic. In fact already a marked increase is apparent in the emigration for the Dominion as well as for the Commonwealth. j