MODERN PROBLEMS

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6543, 13 November 1924, Page 6

MODERN PROBLEMS

DISARMAMENT AND RACIALISM Is the world to belong to the high standard races or the low standard races ? asks Dean Inge, writing in the Morning Post. Is the well-fed, high-ly-educated American workman, with motor car and creased trousers, and an expensively dressed wife, to prevail over the rice-eating Asiatic, who works 14 hours a day, and saves out .of wages on which a white man would starve? The American, the Australian, and the South African feel this to be literally a question of life and death. They are convinced that free competition between the white labourers and Asiatic would mean the speedy and complete extinction of the former. They demand protection of the most drastic kind. Th 6 professional classes do not ask' for. this protection; it is a workingman’s question. The white labourer is economilally so far inferior to the Asiatic that the latter must be kept out altogether. And, if necessary, he must be kept out by battleships and bayonets. The white man has no thought of giving up the weapons which have made him the master and bully of the planet. It is not easy to see how disarmament can ever be accepted while the white labourer can only live behind a Chinese wall, built 'this time to exclude not the Tartars, but the Chinese. The whole future of civilisation is bound up with this problem. Formerly civilisation, was maintained by a small class, and the presence of cheap labour, whether slave or free, only made it more elaborate and luxurious. America has prospered partly by importing low grade white labourers, who came over as adults and so spared their adopted country the expense of rearing them. These importations have injured the racial character of the nation and have reduced the old Americans to dwindling aristocracy; the policy of free immigration has therefore, been given up. But if the Asiatics were admitted, they would soon drive even the cheapest white labour off the field. Will they ultimforce their way in, or will America and Australia remain permanently white? It would be rash to prophesy. But it seems clear that the claim of the -.white labourers to a ijnuch higher standard of living than ■has ever before been reached by his class must commit him not only to a policy of stringent protection but to militarism. If the Asiatic can* give much better value for his wages than the white man (and this is the sole serious' charge against him), he can only be kept at home by telling him that he will be shot if he tries to compete with the whites. '