Round the Sauctums.

Otago Witness, Issue 1419, 1 February 1879, Page 33

Round the Sauctums.

THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.

The Chinaman is the result of a training in the art of low life. For thousands of years China has been filled to the verge with a redundant population. The life of the average Chinaman has been a mere struggle for animal existence. He bears with him the heredity of ten thousand years of pinching poverty, of inctssant toil, of selfish warfare for food. His physical organs have become adapted to such a life. The needs of the body have long Bince been reduced to the minimum. His physical system has been so accustomed to parsimony of diet thatithfs grown into an adaptation to insufficient food. There has baen a piocoss of selection going on in China under which the heavy feeders have falloa [out, and under the survival of the fittest, none but those who can practice the most rigid self-denial as to food remain. They have also been trained by centuries of incessant toil to procure the maximum of subsistence from the soil. The result of this life is a pinched, shrivelled buman.creature, whose muscles are as iron, whose sinews are like thongs, and whose nervea are like Bteel wires, with a Btomach case lined with brass ; a creature who can toil 16 hours of tho 24, and who can live and grow fat on the refuse of any American labourer's table. Capable, aa a late writer says, of driving the vulture from its prey, which he consumes, and then devour the unclean bird itself. Had I said that if unrestricted Chinese immigration were permitted the highly advanced AngloSaxon, the hardy Celt, and the plucky, stubborn German would bo driven out, many would have sneered and denounced me as a pessimist. National vanity, the pride of race, would have said, No ! t l ae Anglo-Saxon, the proud Caucasian will not retire ! No, he will not, for he will demand that the immigration be stopped. But, answer me, how will he compete with these yellow aliens if they still come ? Only by becoming such as they ; and, if he does not, he must starve or retire to other fields. Unrestricted^ Chinese immigration is a substitution of Chiaeio for white men. Let it go on, aad every avenue of industry and trade will be filled by them Bat the economist says : What becomes of the philosophic thoory of the survival of the fittest. History does not record that the typss and varieties of men who have succeeded in supplanting others of different type were the fittest morally, osthetically or intellectually. The fittest is ha who can survive ; that is all there U of the doctrine : not he that is the highest or the best type of maa. Turn ou: yoic fine3t thoroughbred horses to roam the plain with mustangs, or your best and purest strain of Durhams to graze with tho broad-horned beast of Mexico, and see tho opor^tion of the law of survival of tho Ottesfc. Have you not seea the bramble and thistle drive out the wheat ; which wai the fittest ?— Ocn -T. F. Miller's speech iv tho Oalifomia Constitutional Convention.