A CHINESE FAMILY SEPARATED.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9083, 18 June 1888, Page 6

A CHINESE FAMILY SEPARATED.

«. ■ A HARD CASE. Of all the unhappy circumstances connected with the Chinese difficulty, the most unhappy is that which is recorded in ] a paragraph in the Sydney Morning Herald. j A Chinaman, for twelve year.* resident in Tasmania, sent for his wife a few months ago, and she arrived in this port with her daughter by the Cbangsba. She can find no steamer here that will take her to her destination. The owners of the Changsha have done all that lay in their power, and Mr. Quong Tart has interested himself greatly in the matter, but all to no purpose. The woman is described as a person of great delicacy of feeling, and of considerable refinement. Can inhumanity, can injustice, can oppression, go further than this? An idea seems to have taken possession of the country. It is to drive the Chinese from our borders, and to shut those out who come to this Continent by the right of the very laws which our Governments have repudiated. No ship, it appears, will take this wife and mother to her husband, from whom she has been separated for years, nor convey the child to her father, unless the Government of Tasmania will give the company permission. Mr. Quong Tart has telegraphed to the husband to get some one to plead his cause with the Government. Why pleading should be needed for iluch a cause it is hard to understand. The incident brings back the remembrance of ,lalea concerning the slaves in the time of the American civil war. The steamship companies say the difficulties attending the woman's conveyance to Tasmania are insurmountable. " Insurmountable "is a strange word (says the Herald) to use in the face of the heroic methods taken by our authorities lately to override the insurmountable "in the law. The case is a most painful one. If this woman is allowed to return to China, and is prevented from joining her husband, how shall we read the history of this continent in the future ? One such act would destroy the virtue of a century's good deeds and endeavour. No country can afford to do inhuman things. To banish men from their native land is hard : to shut Chinamen out of this country who have come hereto make homes is also hard, chough under some circumstances it may be just; but neither compares in hardship to this occurrence. It is the same spirit of cruelty by which a Jewish wife was torn from her husband in Poland and sent to Circassia, while the husband was driven off to Siberia. Perhaps the deed is not meant as such, but it is prompted by a similar impulse. This woman should be permitted by the Tasmanian Government to join her husband; and if she is prevented how shall the country answer for it, in the name of common justice and humanity ? [In a subsequent issue of the Herald it was stated that the woman and her child had been allowed to land on a guarantee being given that in the event of the steamers declining to take them on to Tasmania they would be returned to Hongkong].