Merely a Suggestion.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXVII, Issue XIII, 28 September 1901, Page 586

Merely a Suggestion.

The Japanese Consul in Sydney has protested against the Commonwealth Immigration Restriction Bill, which proposes to treat the Japs as aliens. He contends that the Japanese belong to an Empire so much higher than those the Bill proposes to include, that it would be a reproach to exclude them. From what one knows of the Japs, the protest is well timed. To exclude them on the ground that they are an inferior race is to ignore contemporaneous history. If we are to have legislation restricting immigration working on the lines of what is inferior and what is superior it would be much more logical to do away with’ racial distinctions, and adopt individual ones. But as under that arrangement the pig-tailed Ching might conceivably take precedence of Bill Sykes, and one is a Chinaman while the other is an Englishman, it is never likely to come into force, aud the suggestion would be at once vetoed as absurd. Yet iu a purely academic way one may be allowed to ask whether, so far as the future of Australia is concerned, it might not be better were the restriction of immigration to these shores based on individual, rather than racial distinctions. Supposing the thing possible, we might then have something approaching a perfect state, whose population was culled from the flower of all peoples—Caucasian. Mongolian, African. Perhaps in the far future some such social condition may be found, as the contrary condition is said to exist in some localities where the off-seourings of all peoples congregate.