THE CHINESE IMMIGRATION BILL IN NEW SOUTH WALES.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 376, 26 April 1879, Page 6

THE CHINESE IMMIGRATION BILL IN NEW SOUTH WALES.

(From the Sydney Mail.)

The Chinese Immigration Bill has come on for discussion in the Legislative Council. Mr. Burton Bradley was heard at the bar of the House iu behalf of the petitioners against the measure ; but though his address was characterised by better taste and more pertinent argument than the one delivered a few weeks ago at the bar of the Assembly, yet it can hardly be held to have seriously damaged the prospect of the proposed legislation. Mr. Burton Bradley is not a great success at the bar of Parliament ; for iustauce, the reference on Wednesday -night to the crime-producing tendencies of the Land Acts could ouly provoke the ire of Sir John Robertson, and was an unaccountable blunder on the part of a special pleader. Nor is it possible to congratulate Sir John on the half-hearted speech with which he moved the second reading of the Bill. Mr. Dailey once more distinguished himself by delivering the most masterly oration on the subject that has yet been heard in either House. Mr. Dailey denies that there is anv real necessity for the measure at all ; but, admitting that the Assembly and the outside public deriiaud some restrictive legislation, promises to vote for the second reading, aud to deal with the objectionable features of the Bill in committee. The debate stands adjourned for a week, when there is little doubt that the second reading will be carried, and it is almost equally certain that the poll-tax clause, and one or two other absurdities, will be excised before the Bill is returned to the Assembly. We notice that Sir John Robertson lepeated Sir Henry l’arkes’ triumphant

little calculation respecting the proportionate number of Chinese and Europeans in the colony. According to the two knights, the true way to take the proportion is to say, not that there is only one Chinaman to 70 Europeans, but (as the Chinese are almost entirely adult males) that there is one Chinaman to every fourteen adult males in the European population. This is an ingenious fashion of getting rid of the one to 70 contrast, and it may be regarded as the private invention of .Sir Henry Parkes. But is it as sound as it is clever? This question of proportion touches the vital point at issue, and is worth looking at closely. The Chinese danger is either a present or a prospective one. If it be a present one, the argument is that the 9000 Chinamen are actually competing with about 120,000 European workers. But this fact only exists in the imagination of those who abuudantly declare it. The amount of actual competition is ridiculously small. The great majority of resident Mongolians are golddiggers, and they take themselves to workings abandoned by Europeans, getting their living in districts which otherwise would not support a flock of sheep. How can it be said that they are competitive workers? Another class consists of market gardeners, a small minority of whom compete with European gardeners in or near the metropolis ; the rest supply localities in the interior, which, but for tlieir enterprise, would go uuBupplied with vegetables. Then there are a few Chinese storekeepers ; but in the face of the cruelly keen competition which European storekeepers are daily exhibiting, it would be hypercritical and hypocritical to object to tlie Chinese drop in the bucket. Aud, by the way, the very classes most concerned iu the recent strike are the principal frequenters of Chinese shops. In short, the competition complained of is chiefly confined to the single trade of cabinet-making, and the real proportion is luirdly one to 100 instead of one to 14. If the danger is a prospective one, then the 9000 need not rob us of our sleep. If they were not adult males —if they were a gathering of men, women, aud children, they might multqdy indefinitely ; hut then they aresimply bo many bachelors. Eighteen years ago there were 18,000 Chinese iu the colony, so that they have decreased 50 per cent. And we have called upon the world to witness our convulsions over such a vanishing danger as that !