BIOLOGY AND "THE YELLOW PERIL"
(To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.'
Sm,—Recent events in Manchuria have led me to reflect upon the position of the Mongolian races in relation to future world dominion. I will not repeat the views of Lafeadio Hearn expressed in his essay " China and the Western World " which appeared nearly forty years ago, but there are reasons which lead one to similar conclusions.
The Mongol occupies an area of the earth varying between polar and equatorial climate. Ile is a colonist in the true sense, in that wherever he goes he can live and increase and neither his mind nor his body appears to be affected by change of habitat. He appears able to live and work well on a mere fraction of a European's daily food and can undercut most sources of human labour.
It has been said that the Chinese can never become a world power because they lack sense of political unity. Civil wars of recent years tend to confirm this, but may not their political disunity be their biological strength ? Unrest means movement. During the last thirty years the colonizing Chinese have flowed steadily into the Malay States, where there are now as many Chinese as Malays. The Chinese run much of the finance of the country, they keep the stores and of some menial tasks such as cooking they have the monopoly. The British flag flies over Malaya and the Chinese arc content, for they have accomplished a biological invasion.
The Chinese are on the move in Siberia. That immense .country is very thinly populated, yet comparatively fertile. There are to-day thriving village .communities in parts where no human being was ten years ago. Again, in Manchuria, there were two million immigrants during the period 1927-29, which is as much as Canada added to her population by immi- gration and natural increase combined in the period of her greatest expansion 1901-1911.
We are conversant with the spread of the Japanese on the western coast of America. Front Alaska to Chile he is there to stay, for he is ready to do many things the white races appear to think not worth while, for instance the Japanese run the strawberry gardens of California. It is difficult to see how bans on immigration can possibly stem this tide of humanity so well versed in the art of existence. The birth rate in Japan is still increasing, yet owing to industrialization, the Japanese have barely started to colonize. Do we estimate fairly the biological strength of the Mongolian peoples ,
King's Buildings, University of Edinburgh.
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