relatively more important element of the population in the tropical territory of north Queensland. While they engage to some extent in ordinary plantation labor in the latter country, and are employed as general laborers, the laws of the State prevent their being employed as miners or upon public works, such as railway construction. They occupy themselves chiefly as independent cultivators, especially as lessees of land which they take for a term of years to clear and till, after which they turn it over to the owner in good shape for handling by white men. It is as pioneers and bush clearers of this sort that they are chiefly appreciated by the owner of tropical lands in Australia. The crop to which they devote themselves principally is bananas, and they largely control both the production and the distribution of this fruit in the Commonwealth, dealing with wholesalers among their own countrymen in the southern cities, and thus maintaining the trade in their own hands. In the larger towns they are also taking up what is one of their favorite occupations in the Hawaiian Islands, the grocery business, though this is as yet a new departure in Australia. The last report of the chief inspector of factories of New South Wales states that there are about 70 Chinese groceries in Sydney. Until recently they have not engaged in laundry work, but now their signs are numerous in all the Australian cities. It is in the furniture trade, however, that their competition has been most severely felt by urban workmen. There is a large district in Melbourne principally devoted to this business, and the same is true to a less degree in Sydney. According to the evidence given before the shops and factories commission of South Australia, in 1892, the same competition existed to some extent in Adelaide at that date. The second progress report of the factories act inquiry board of Victoria, rendered in 1894, is devoted largely to this aspect of Chinese labor. It was shown that where 10 years before the cabinetmakers' union had 200 members employed, there were at the date mentioned only 15 members at work. In 1880 the total number of Chinese carpenters and cabinetmakers in Melbourne was given, in a special return made to the premier, as 66. In 1889 there were 45 Chinese furniture factories in operation, employing 584 hands. The Orientals, like the European workmen, suffered from the collapse of the boom in 1893. When the report was made, however, a year after that event, the chief inspector of factories reported 228 Chinese as engaged in the trade.

The history of this competition shows from what slight and almost accidental beginnings an industrial condition affecting the prosperity of a whole line of manufacturing and the welfare of a considerable body of workmen may arise. The Chinese began woodworking in Australia by making boxes for their countrymen for sending gold to China during the early digging period. When this employment

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ceased, they began to make common chairs, which they hawked about the colony for sale. Then they made cheap washstands and toilet tables, and the commoner grade of bedroom furniture. Evidently the immigrants who took up this occupation did not belong to the more skilled class of workmen of their own country; for they are said not to have known the art of dovetailing and mortising, and to have produced work of an inferior character, fastened together by the aid of nails and glue. They copied the design, rather than the construction of the better class of European work, and thus were able to supply an article presentable enough so far as outside appearance went, but wholly without workmanship and durability. These goods were sold as European wares by the dealers. It was maintained by merchants that stamping articles, or requiring them to be sold under a Chinese label, would do little to remedy the situation. One dealer stated in the evidence: "If there is a difference of 5 per cent they (customers) take the Chinese article. I carry on a large business, and that has been my experience right through, both as a master and as a salesman. The price is the ruling element. As to patriotism, there is nothing at all in it as to selling furniture; it is 'pocketism.'" However, the Chinese overcompeted among themselves, and, as stated, suffered with the others during the financial crash. They had formed their own unions, and in 1893 struck against a 20 per cent reduction in wages, going back to work finally at a 7 per cent reduction. The effect of their competition was to reduce the wages of European workmen below a living standard. Indeed, several Europeans were working for Chinese employers. The Chinese generally had half-caste apprentices, whom they used as interpreters, paying them 9s. ($2.19) a week, with a slight increase after long service. Europeans engaged in furniture making were able to earn from 20s. to 30s. ($4.87 to $7.30) a week at piecework. Wardrobes that were reckoned at 8 days' work of 9 hours a day, were made for 27s. 6d. ($6.69). The price of making a Kauri (hard pine) extension table, 6 feet by 3 feet 6 inches, and staining in imitation of black walnut, had gradually been reduced from 15s. to 6s. ($3.65 to $1.46). The board which presented this report recommended strict factory and sanitary supervision of the Chinese; a legal maximum of 48 hours per week; that every place in which one or more Chinese was engaged in manufacturing for sale should be regarded as a factory, and that the furniture be stamped with the name of the maker in such a way as to show whether it was the work of Chinese or European mechanics. These recommendations became law in practically the form presented, and the provision including any place where a single Chinaman is employed under factory supervision has been generally enforced by statute throughout Australia.

An objection to the Chinese worker that becomes especially strong in a country like Australia, where there is much state regula

tion of industry, is the facility with which he manages to evade factory laws and regulations and to elude the surveillance of inspectors. The furniture makers of Victoria are now under a minimum wage determination established by a government board under the factories act, but the inspector reports that the Chinese commonly work "at times prohibited and at rates below those fixed." In a report of the New South Wales Royal Commission, which investigated the working of the Victorian factories act and minimum wage board system in 1901, it is stated that "to stop this, unless there be an inspector to each man, seems improbable. The consequence of the Chinese and other (slow worker) competition is that factories where the cheaper kind of furniture is made are in a bad way." The Victorian Royal Commission of 1902 says: "Hitherto no method has been devised of effectively controlling these people and of compelling them to observe either factory or sanitary laws. The solitary worker, especially, in both these trades (furniture and laundry) defies the law with the quiet pertinacity which is characteristic of his race, and an occasional prosecution has utterly failed to make him observe it." The same indirect evasion of the shops half-holiday law is charged by the Sydney inspectors. As a result of this disposition, regulations made for the purpose of helping the white workman may become an instrument for increasing the effectiveness of Chinese competition.

So far as such competition exists at present or may exist in the future, therefore, it is a crucial contention with the Australian labor party, advocating and imposing so far as possible state regulation of industry, that this disturbing factor of cheap and largely uncontrollable labor shall be eliminated from the problem which they have in hand. This fact, with other considerations to be mentioned later, gives especial pertinence to the first place occupied by the "White Australia" plank in their platform.

The number of Chinese in Australia, however, has been decreasing gradually under the recent restrictive legislation. In 1891 they numbered 38,077, or 11.97 for every 1,000 of the population. In 1901 their absolute number had fallen to 33,231, while their relative numbers, as compared with the total population of the Commonwealth, had fallen to 8.81 for every 1,000 inhabitants. Of the 8,783 Chinese males and 530 females reported as engaged in gainful occupations in Queensland that year, 3,466, or more than one-third, were market gardeners or fruit growers, 654 were employed on sugar plantations, 1,310 were engaged in various commercial undertakings, ranging all the way from petty hawking to wholesale importing, 597 were house servants, and 529 were engaged in placer mining, most of the latter washing from the tailings and old fields deserted by white miners, as they do along the Fraser River in British Columbia. With the exception of 58 cabinetmakers, the Chinese do not appear to be engaged in factory

occupations in Queensland, and no reference to Oriental employment is to be found in the annual report of the factory inspector of that State. South Australia had at the time of the 1901 enumeration 3,280 male and 175 female Chinese residents. Of the latter but 6 were wageearners. Mining industries employed the labor of 1,519 of the males, or nearly one-half, 391 were engaged in market gardening, 224 were seamen or ship's employees in various capacities, and 169 were engaged in domestic service. A considerable number were reported in the skilled trades, including 63 carpenters and 42 tailors. Most of the South Australian Chinese, however, are in the northern territory, the tropical country around Port Darwin, and are separated by the breadth of the continent and by practically insuperable barriers of unoccupied and semiarid country from the more thickly settled portions of the State. Their presence is therefore less felt as a competitive factor by the working people. The factory inspector in his report refers to the present competition of the Chinese in the furniture trade as unimportant. Victoria has a Chinese population of 7,349, of whom 609 are females. The number of Chinese employed in the furniture trade in the years 1900 and 1901, respectively, was 552 and 574, an increase of 22, while the whole number of European males and females, including upholsterers and workers in special branches of furniture making where there is no Oriental competition, in the two years in question, was 1,239 and 1,238, a decrease of just one. The number of Chinese in laundry work increased from 194 to 242, and the number of Europeans in the same occupation increased from 412 to 521 during the same period. New South Wales had a Chinese population of 11,263 in 1901, of whom 673 were females. The statistics of their occupations are not available.

There are about 3,000 Japanese in Australia, most of them in Queensland, where they are employed as field hands on the sugar plantations and are engaged largely in the pearl and bêche-de-mer fisheries upon the north coast. A number of Syrians have settled in Melbourne, and are said to be initiating a new sweating evil in the underclothing trade. About as many Hindoos and Cingalese as Japanese have found a home in the Commonwealth, where they are included under the title. "Syrians" in local parlance. These people have taken to itinerant vending, especially to pack peddling through the country districts. Many of them are British subjects by birth, but this has not affected the policy of state and Federal governments in restricting their immigration. Indeed a contract-labor law, somewhat similar to our own, has been applied to restrain English mechanics coming to Australia under engagement from entering the country. Another phase of this introimperial exclusion appeared indirectly last year, though not in connection with permanent immigrants, when the Federal Government refused to sign a mail contract with a British steamship line employing colored firemen, though the latter were British subjects.

The third aspect of the White Australia question, relating to the exclusion of Pacific Islanders and other alien plantation labor, has chiefly local significance, in that it applies peculiarly to a single State; but it has reacted indirectly upon Federal policy, because of its economic relation to the production of sugar. In Queensland it is the old and unsolved problem of tropical plantation labor; in Melbourne it is in addition the fiscal question of a high tariff upon the importation of sugar, in order to foster sugar planting without black labor, complicated by a subsidy addendum. The Commonwealth has undoubtedly been willing to make sacrifices to keep white. It is willing to pay a high price for sugar without any corresponding return in revenue, in order to try the experiment of raising cane in the Tropics with white field labor, and even to pay a considerable sum annually out of the public purse, if this prove necessary, in order to keep the business going upon that basis. But the history of the White Australia question in this most significant sense of the word has been essentially local until within the last three years.

Sugar raising began to attract attention in Queensland in the sixties, and in 1867 there were 6 small mills in operation in the colony. The growth of the industry was checked somewhat during the following decade by the selection for cultivation of varieties of cane not adapted to the country, and the appearance of a blight that devastated most of the fields. Recovery was rapid, however, with the introduction of the harder bamboo canes, though manufacturing and cultivating were still done in a very small way by the individual planters. In 1883-84 there were 41,367 acres under cane, of which 25,792 acres were ground, and 36,148 tons of sugar were produced. There were 152 mills in operation, however, or a mill for about every 272 acres, with an average output of less than 240 (long) tons each-a wasteful method of production that could not exist in face of serious competition. The first central mill was erected the following year, with the assistance of a government loan of $243,500 granted for that purpose. In 1893 a "Sugar Works Guarantee Act" was passed by the colonial parliament, which provided that any group of farmers could form themselves into a company, and by mortgaging their lands to the government obtain sufficient capital to erect a mill. Under this act the government had invested £512,600 8s. 10d. ($2,494,570.05) in mill advances up to June 30, 1901, and had at that date £61,372 18s. 11d. ($298,671.44) additional outstanding in overdue interest and redemption installments. Therefore the sugar industry in Queensland is a matter of direct public concern to every taxpayer, and the White Australia programme, as indirectly affecting what might be termed a consolidated state interest, acquires more than ordinary significance from both a sectional and a national standpoint.