Under the heading "The Coloured Man in Australia," the Daily
Chronicle of Christmas Day publishes a very curious letter from a Sydney native-born. He complains that the Eastern peoples are swarming into Australia. After noting that the Chinese often contrive to evade the exclusion laws, he declares that at present there are in New South Wales -over one thousand Syrians, as many Hindoos, and about the same number of Afghans, principally camel-drivers, besides ICanakas. Altogether there are, he says, about twenty thousand adult males in the Colony belonging to the Eastern races. Meantime the Colony is threatened with a rush of -Japanese settlers. Besides these Easterns the community, he -declares, is being diluted by the influx of a low Greek and Italian population,—" the scum of the Mediterranean." Very likely there is a great deal of exaggeration in all this—men seldom keep their heads on such topics as alien immigration —but we cannot wonder that the Englishmen of New South Wales have been scared at even the shadow of a possibility of their population becoming a reflection on a huge scale of that of Alexandria or Port Said. We do not believe that the Italians are undesirable emigrants, but we sympathise with the desire to keep New South Wales a Christian and mainly Teutonic community, even if that involves a slow growth. It
would have been better for the United States had they filled up less fast, and had the proportion of native-born remained larger. Sixty years ago President Monroe boasted that the great bulk of his people were born in America. Australia's best remedy is Free-trade. It is largely her protective system which makes the Eastern peoples press on her.
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