Part 24 (1/2)
CHAPTER XVIII
AUSTRALASIA
New Zealand and Australia are to-day the only spots in the world wherein the white race may expand without encroaching upon already existing and developed races. The extent to which they are taking advantage of their opportunities, the extent to which they are enlarging the scope and the quality of progressive civilization is the measure of their right to the maintenance of their exclusive ”White-Australasia” policy.
I confess at the outset that I am at a loss for an adequate argument against this policy. Narrow, selfish, dog-in-the-manger-like as it may be, we are faced with the other question: From time out of mind China and India have had two of the largest slices of the world's surface.
What have they done with them? How can India and Asia, having littered up their domains with human beings, ask that more of the world be turned over to them for a repet.i.tion of the same ghastly reproduction? They have made it impossible, with their degradation of womanhood and their exaltation of caste and ancestry, for new life to start with anything like a decent chance. Is there not every reason to believe that permitted to take up quarters in the open s.p.a.ces of the white man's world, they will do the same?
True that the white man, in both of these cases, has wrested his lands from existing native tribes. But it was also true that, in New Zealand at least, and through Polynesia, the natives were immigrants who in their turn imposed on yet more primitive natives, as did the j.a.panese.
Furthermore, no race on earth has been given a better opportunity to make good than has the Maori in New Zealand. The Australoid seems on the whole not equipped for the effort. There have been cases of Australian blacks making good. There is the case of the savage who after receiving an education became a Shakespearean scholar. But the exception only proves the rule. Furthermore, though there is bitter opposition to any white man marrying a native black woman in Australia--an opposition that is calling for legal action from some quarters so that such marriage will be in future impossible--still, the White-Australia policy is not aimed against the blacks. These will either take hold of themselves and make good, in time, or will die out. Be that as it may, there is no answer to the Asiatic demand for admission based on the argument about the white man's plunder.
The only other argument is that, if this is the case, the white man must get out of Asia. There too, it seems to me, is a weak spot. The white man in Asia--as man to man--does not lower the standard of the civilization of the native; nor is he ever likely to migrate in numbers large enough to create a problem. Only politically, where a leeching-process exists, where native industries are destroyed by cheap foreign products (like that of cotton goods, which were forced upon the Indians by the British, to the utter ruination of the Indian textiles) has the havoc been serious. That is a real argument, and it is up to the Asiatics so to adjust their own affairs and to come together as to ”oust” the white man,--a problem for the natives to solve for themselves.
There is still another consideration. What of j.a.pan? j.a.pan has national unity, she is advancing. Is she, then, to be made an exception in the White-Australia policy? The answer is, j.a.pan must do as she would be done by, an answer which will be enlarged upon in the chapter dealing with j.a.pan.
Having thus focused on the negative phases of this discussion, let us see what is written on the inner side of the Australasian s.h.i.+eld. Before we can at all understand the motives that move Australasia in the direction she is going, and foresee the future, we shall have to know by what channels she came to be what she is, what ideals are parents to her being, and what ideals are her offspring.
Strange as it may seem, Britain's interest in her south Pacific possessions have always been more or less mild. When the question of annexing New Zealand came up in 1839, the Duke of Wellington said in Parliament that Great Britain already had too many colonies. It is common knowledge that she gave them as much rope as they would take, that when she had the opportunity of acquiring the Samoan group in 1889 she let it slip, and that she took the Fiji Islands only after their chief, Thakambau, offered them in liquidation of unjust debts to America. In other words, it was New Zealand and Australia that held on to the mother country, instead of the reverse. And in order to understand the spirit of the Dominion and the Commonwealth, we must consider the reasons for their clinging to ”home.”
Australia was first settled by men convicted of offences against Britain's then crude sense of justice; but New Zealand was devised as a colonial scheme under which every feature of British life was to be transplanted. When Europeans came to America, political and religious freedom was sought. When Great Britain went to New Zealand, eighty-five years ago, society was politically and religiously free, but industrial organization was awaiting an ambitious hand. In New Zealand it was not, as Havelock Ellis puts it so vividly, ”the roving of a race with piratical and poetic instincts invading old England where few stocks arrived save by stringent selection of the sea.” They did not come because of romantic longing, nor to escape oppression and restriction.
The story of the development of New Zealand, from settlement and conquest of the Maories to the beginning of that legislation which has made it famous, is the story of conservatism. When the first s.h.i.+pload of colonists set out from England, their prospectus was a doc.u.ment of conservatism. The aim of the projectors was to transplant every phase and station and cla.s.s of English life, to build in the other end of the world another England.
Doubtless the fathers of this scheme were seeking to overcome the fear of forced transplantation which had made of Australia a land of horror in antic.i.p.ation, and hence they spread broadcast accounts of the sort of colony New Zealand was to be, which made it alluring. But such are the erring tendencies of human nature that Australia, intended to be the land of one of the worst forms of indentured and penal servitude and the perpetuation of unprogressiveness, set the pace for the entire world in untried liberalism in industry, while New Zealand, likewise advanced, has developed her latent conservatism in regard to imperialism to a marked degree.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MOUNTAINS ARE CALLED THE REMARKABLES Farmer M---- had the reputation for being the worst boss in the Wakatipu (New Zealand)]
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BLUE MOUNTAINS OF AUSTRALIA Seen from this side they look more like gorges]
[Ill.u.s.tration: AUSTRALIA DENUDING HERSELF Photo from Brown Bros.]
For apart from the experiments in labor legislation, New Zealand has never lost any of the dependence on England. She seems to be afraid of her isolation, lest, deprived of communication with the world, she should be forced into a condition such as that in which the white man found the heliolithic Maories. Canada might become a nation separate from Britain; so might Australia. But New Zealand has not even that proximity to a continent which made England what she is, for she is twelve hundred miles from her nearest neighbor. In consequence, the New Zealanders have always maintained a strong leaning toward the homeland, whereas in Australia early resentment alienated the settlers. The New Zealander to-day is the exact replica of the Englishman as we knew him; the Australian is a compromise between an Englishman and an American.
The modern Australian on the east coast of the continent is as little an Englishman as possible. I have heard any number of Australians resent being called English. The last ”convict” was brought to Australia in 1840; yet the Australians are very conscious of this stigma on them. The other day an English engineer told me that in Subiaco, one of the suburbs of Perth, it was impossible for one to join the tennis-club whose grandfather was born in Australia--lest that ign.o.ble ancestor should have pa.s.sed on some of the ”taint” to his unfortunate offspring.
Yet in the eyes of enlightened legislation, the taint involved is of course questionable.
It is therefore not to be wondered at that Australia kept growing farther and farther from England. In the early days each settlement maintained its own government, and so great was the jealousy among the settlements that they sought to bar one another even in the construction of railroads. Victoria built a broad-gage line, New South Wales, a narrower, and Queensland the narrowest,--not mere engineering accident due to any notion of superiority of the special line, but clearly and openly to make communication of one with another difficult. But by 1900 the settlements had outgrown their childish squabbling, and they became federated into the Commonwealth of Australia.
Though this brought them together within Australia, it awoke New Zealand to the danger of being drawn into that union against her will. ”The Melbourne Age” prophesied that in a quarter of a century they would be federated. ”The fate and destiny of Australia and New Zealand were the same and they should be united in the defense of these distant lands that were held by people of the same thought and same political system.”
But there never has been much love lost between them. New Zealanders have been anathema in Australia, and Australians hadn't a ghost of a chance of getting a job in New Zealand. Nor was this a matter of different standards of living, except that they both discriminated against the Englishman. And not without reason, for the type of Englishman who set out for the Antipodes was one who generally had nothing to sustain him at home. To the Australasians he was virtually a foreigner, and foreigners of any sort are few in the far South, and are encouraged still less. Yet there is excessive pride in the fact that something like 98 per cent. of the inhabitants are British.
In view of the economic departures they have taken from European conceptions, this would seem a paradox. But even among the workers, the psychological effect of ”home” is apparent to the most casual observer.
Though material security has been a.s.sured by the State, the result of much of the legislation in the Antipodes seems to me to have been something akin to the cla.s.s system in England. The worker has become legally recognized as a worker, he has been given a minimum wage and protection against imposition, but any effort on the part of labor to crystallize its ideals is still obnoxious to the ma.s.ses. There is not even any of the impulse found among American workers toward that rise in the social scale which is essentially bourgeois. There is a most decided tendency to accept the status of worker in the good old English fas.h.i.+on.
Working-people do not regard themselves as ”gentlemen” or as ”ladies,”
these terms in New Zealand having the same significance they have in the old country. Deference to one who does not look like a laborer is p.r.o.nounced, and the average workman is more ambitious for the ”gentleman” than he is for himself. This spirit obtains much more in New Zealand than in Australia.
Than dignity in labor nothing in the world could be more worthy. But if that dignity spells merely content, it lays society open to a renewal of the very cla.s.s divisions industrial progress has sought to remove. The laborer is too content to remain a laborer actively to enter the lists against injustice. And in a short time you have those who refused to be doped by the talk of virtue in labor on the top, and the laborer at the bottom.