SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 21, 21 May 1903, Page 3

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

IX.—WHERE WEST MEETS EAST.

By the Editor

Vancouver looks out to the Orient. It is Canada's western door of commerce with the lands that lie at the gate of the rising sun. And there is much in its population und trade that reflects its relations with ihe unchanging East. When we stepped ashore fi om the Mrana and had shouldered our way through a crowd of hotel touts, porters, expressmen, wharfingers, and idlers, we pushed along a wharf littered with countless packt ges of tea and silk, past a group of pig-tailed Chinese in blue cotton trousers and smocks and felt-soled shoes, and a few sleek, well-groomed little men from Japan foppishly arrayed in the latest London modes.

You meet representatives of the Hwa Kwo or Kingdom of Flowers (the Sleepy Hollow of the Orient) and of Japan (its America) at every few paces in the streets of Victoria and Vancouver. Each city counts among its population some 3000 or more Chinese. British Columbia has some 15,000 Celestials and about 4000 Japanese. The province is, in fact, Co a great extent ' run ' on the

Labor of the Yellow Man

Practically the whole Chinese and Japanese population of British Columbia consists of adult males. They conduct laundries, fruit, vegetable, tobacco shops, and little stalls for the sale of ladies' slippers, curios, and such Chinese delicacies as samshui (rice-spirit), dried shark-fins, squashed duck, and strings of black sausages. The Chinese are the hawkers of the place. They carry their wares in the traditional way in two baskets slung at the end of long sticks, and . they have not — as they have in Australia — rival Hindu and Mahomedan peddlers from India to interfere with their monopoly. They are cooks, nurses, house- maids,' ' generals,' and the rest, and they look spotlessly clean and neat in their white .raiment, and as grave and dignified as a congress of ancient Druids. In the Canadian Pacific Company's large hotel youthful Japanese act as bell-boys, and they are voluminously alive and miraculously active nnd alert In the Kamloops and elsewhere in the \ alleys of British Columbia, Chinese aie very successfully employed on farms and fruit-ranches. Chinese and Japanese alike are engaged in the logging camps (where, however, the felling is done by white men), on the railway lines as navvies, in saw-mills, fisheries, canneries, stores, factories, mines. They work for what are locally deemed low wages — £5 to £7 per month. The eight-hours' day is to them an unknown institution. They plod away steadily whether the master's eye is upon them or not. ' Set a Chinkie (Chinaman) on a job,' 6aid a local employer to me, ' and he'll freeze to it. He'll keep his eye-teeth in it till midnight, but

He'll see it through '

Except that he has secured wider avenues of employment in British Columbia, John Chinaman's position there is practically Uie same as that which he occupies in Australia and New Zealand. Like the helix snail, ho carries his home — his China — with him wherever ho goes : its traditions, habits, and modes of thought. He never adopts the spirit or the ideals of his new surroundings. Chinamen are a placid, stolid, inscrutable race. But they are law-abiding, ingenious, hard-working, frugal, and cojuld live and wax fat where a Canadian would starve.

The Jap is cast in quito a different mould. He has the industry and toughness of the Chinaman, btut is far more alert, enterprising, perceptive, and ambitious. He stands not much naoie than five feet high. But he is well knit, muscular, and dexterous, and every cubic inch in him is a storage battery crammed with energy. An Irishman, crushing and elbowing his way into a packed political gathering, answered an angry remonstrance with the remark : ' What on airth is the use of bein' in a crowd if you don't push ? ' The Jap is one of the most pushful of all the variegated races of mankind upon this planet. He enjoys pushing for the sheer fun of the thing. Once he took to ' western ideas,' he did so with a high fever of enthusiasm. He has elbowed his way to the practical commercial control of the Hawaiian Islands. And in British Columbia he has managed in a few years to squeeze and crush his way into every avenue of trade and commerce.

A Japanese will give a Caucasian a start of a mile in business and pass him in the sixth lap. The number of Japanese in British Columbia is small, but they have become, none

the less, relatively serious competitors, especially in the small trades of the province, even with the keen and sturdy business beople from Ontario who form the principal stock of its English-speaking population. The Chinese and Japanese have their vices.. But it is their virtues, and not their vices that make them such formidable rivals to the European laborer in British Columbia. The introduction of • interior peoples ' did not get time to develop, as it did in America, from a purely labor to a mainly radical problem in Canada's westernmost province. But it has aroused strong political feeling and has started an agitation almost as hot and voluble as that which went tongue-clacking nearer, home to usover the question of a ' white Australia.' Feelinir in British Columbia, as far as 1 could ascertain it, was strongly divided on the question of the retention or exclusion of the Orientals. < We're ruined by Chinese cheap labor, was, m stobstance, the plaint of many with whom I conversed. Others— and chiefly employers— chorused a different song : • In the present circumstances of British Columbia, and for many years to come, cheap labor is ndispensable, and its exclusion would be a stunning blow to the development of the province.' Between two such contradictory views of men • on the premises ' how should a stranger from afar decide ? Just as we reached British Columbia, the anti-Orientals had succeeded in getting a grip upon the lobe of the provincial Government's ear. By

An Order in Council

Chinese and Japanese were forbidden to cut shinglebol's or logt— a favorite occupation of theirs— on Crown lanas. Fresh provincial legislation was also framed for the purpose of closing various other avenues of employment against the Orientals. With a population of close on 4^,000,000 in an area not much larger than that of the British Isles, Japan could readily afford to lend or lose a few thousand of its young men to British Columbia. But the Japanese Government is proud and high-spirited. It is disinclined to allow its subjects to go t..» com ti ie where they will not be received o-i eqi al terms, an 1 therefore prohibited Japanese ermgration to British Columbia, except in cases of residents of Canada, and bona fide merchants and students But Chinese immigrants still continued to arrive by every steamer. The Canadian Government serenely pocketed a hundred dollars (£2O) poll-tax for each of them. The children of the glowing East landed. But they found no situations vacant on western Canadian soil. So they wended their weary way towards the American border, in tho wake of those whose occupation as shinglo-bolt cutters, log-splitters, etc , was gone. America did not want the yellow visitors. But her frontier-line was long and her immigration staff too few to deal with the yellow exodus from British territory. And thus it came about that Canada

Got the Poll-tax

and Uncle Sam got the Chinamen. In the mind of many in Western Canada, America has paid too dearly for the cheap labor that wrought in the cotton-fields of the South in the days before the great Civil War. The yellow question in British Columbia never passed the phase of a labor problem, and the opponents of the Orientals maintain that the course of provincial legislation and the action of the Japanese Government will save Canada in the future from such a menacing race difficulty as that which faces Uncle Sam in the Black Belt of the United States.

Another glint of the Orient met our eyes on landing (as already indicated) in great piles of teas and silksscrawled over with intricate hieroglyphics. They were being shot into C.P.It, freight cars by squads of men, to be sent tearing away over the iron rails to Chicago] Toronto, Montreal, and the cities of the Atlantic seaboard. A little beyond us rose the double funnels and tho graceful white hulls of one of the ' Empress ' steamers, which the Canadian Pacific Company placed in these waters to develop the trade of America and the Dominion with far Cathay. There is a triplet of those fine

Greyhounds of the Pacific

Each of them is 485 feet long, of 6000 tons register and 10,000 horse power, and they are the fastest and most luxurious steamers that cut a furrow in the Pacific. They have brought Yokohama within ten days of Vancouver and fourteen of New York and Boston.

Nowadays the race of commerce is to the swift and its battle to the strong. Money-getting is about the most cosmopolitan occupation on earth, and trade, as such, is cold poison to national sentiment. To the teaimporter in the eastern States it matters little that the 'Murikah eagle doesn't scream and flap its wings over British Columbia. It does matter somewhat that Van-

ccfciver is 109 miles nearer to New York, and 275 miles to Boston, than San Francisco is. Jt matters still more that Vancouver is by over a thousand miles the shortest and swiftest route from the tea-producing regions of the Far East to New York, Boston, and Liverpool. Bulzac —a coffee drinker, by the way— described tea as an insipid and dismal beverage (' boisson fade et melancolique ').De Quincey, with a better experience of it, declared that it ' will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.' We intellectuals like our tea, find we. like it early in the season, when the young rolled loaf is fresh from the sorting-machine. Hence the annual competitive rush of steamers over the seas with China's ' New Season's Teas.' And hence the value of the Vancouver route to enterprising tea-merchants in America and Great Britain. Dubliners used to be considered not alone the ' cardrivingest,' but also the ' tay-drinkingest,' pooplo on the face of the earth. The last-mentioned pre-eminence belongs to them no more, if it e\er did. For quantity consumed per head of population Australasia takes a long and easy lead— from New Zealand, with its seven pounds pe,r inhabitant in 1901 to Western Australia, which tops the world's record with 10 pounds per head. In total imports Australasia, despite its meagre popular tion of little over four and a half millions, takes thud place. Great Britain heads the list. Russia is a good second. The United States and Canada follow next in order after Australasia. Other countries are simply nowhere by comparison. The United States and Canada have a preference for Japanese tea, and they absorb almost all of it that is exported from the land of the Mikado. Vancouver is also the nearest port and the great outfitting centre for the rich goldfields that ' broke out' some years ago away in the frozen north near the Rim of the Arctic Circle. At one of the long wharves a steamer was loading with miscellaneous stores for Skagway (in Alaska)— the doorway to Klondyke, and for St. Michael's, in the Behring Sea. A little way out in the deep waters of the Inlet. a passenger steamer was churning a wake of tossing foam on one of its regular trips across the Strait to JNianaimo Others were going to and coming from Victoria and the bustling and fast-rising American cities of Seattle, Tacoma, etc., in the 'Western Mediterranean' of Fuget Sound. Here and there around Burraid Inlet you see against the dark-eieen backgiound of s-traight-stemmed pines Huffy patches of steam and hear the musical hum that indicates a saw-mill And tied up to rambling \\har\os beside them are caigo steamers and tall-masted sailing \essels (irie\erently termed ' tramps ' and ' wind-jammers ') loading Ves-tein Canada's soft woods for South America, China, Japan, Austialui, and the British Isles. On the waters of the Inlet lay gi eat rafts and Parks of Logs : some of them huge monsters 100 to 150 feet long and up to four feet m diameter. As we passed a l,ig sawmill one of those falle-n forest giants — a Douglas In— was beirg dissected by the flying teeth of two immense circular saws. These were placed \etticalh — en • above and somewhat in advance of the other, and us the.v hummed their noisy tune — like a pair of tigers purring over then prey — the odorous planks that fell from their jaws woie almost as straight in the pram and flawless us the cedar stem of jour load pencil. The engines ol those sawmills go slogging away, clmkety-tlank. at a gie.it rate. Their boiler-furnaces need no stol ers '1 hoy devour the saw dust, and this is fed automatically to them by machinery which is a great advance on that used in New South Wales and Queensland to cair\ the fibrous refuse of the cane to the furnaces m the sugarmills A sugar refinery, iron, cement, paint, and steelpipe works, cigar factory, and sundry cannei les me also among the industries of Canada's pushful western poit. Vancouver stretches out to east and west. Its haibor is one of the finest in the world, is four or five miles wide, and of enormous depth. Young as it is, the city is the great emporium of Western Canada ; the natural outlet of the varied wealth of its fields, gaichn-., fisheries, forests, factories, and mines , the focus of the converging traffic of all the rising cities in the I'n^ct Sinind, the inlet of the wealth of the Al.isl an goldfiekls and of a great and growing i orticn ol the lommeice o! noi thwestern America with the countries of the Far East. They are all feeders to its ever expanding commerce Vancouver must 'grow ; and in time will fully justify her prophetic title, ' the Glasgow of the West ' (To be continued.)