premature and compulsory association with the white man. We refuse to remove them from their own land, or to break up the healthy measure of isolation in which they live there, lest they should become mere hewers of wood and drawers of water for a different and more advanced race. Further, we have never put any difficulties in the way of the employment of black races or half-castes.

(c) It is not founded on a desire for pecuniary gain for any class of white Australians, or for them as a whole. It is a defensive measure to prevent an intolerable lowering of the standard of living, which even in Australia is not too high if the mass of men are to have a free and worthy life.

(d) It is not grounded on race or colour prejudice. No mention of that is made in the definition, for it is certain that if there were white men as radically different in ideals and as far beneath us in the standard of living as Asiatics are, Australia would reject them as immigrants with the same decision. But as it happens that all the races who would flood Australia under free immigration are "coloured," the popular imagination has seized upon the accident and let the essential go, in the name it has given to the policy.

III.—True Object of Policy is to ward off National Danger.

These misconceptions being removed, we have now to ask what was the object of the policy? It was an effort to ward off a great national danger which may any day become pressing, but which Australian political leaders first clearly saw and tried to meet at the Colonial Conference of 1897. That danger is the revival, under new names and different conditions, of that migration of the peoples which overwhelmed the Roman Empire. The great difficulty in dealing with opponents of the "White Australia" policy is that they entirely fail to see how new in modern times, and how portentously great the evil to be fought against is. It is not, as they for the most part conceive it to be, a mere

natural infiltration of wandering labourers from one similarly civilised country into another, like the influx of Germans into England, or of Italians into France. In such cases the immigrants, having similar social, moral and political ideals, their descendants imperceptibly merge into the population of the country they have migrated to. Nor is it even a case like the immigration of Russian and other Eastern Jews into England, though that is so much more serious than the other cases that it has compelled England to pass an Immigration Restriction Act.*

The special features that render that more serious are of the same kind as those which render the immigration of coloured labour into Australia dangerous. The immigrants are not at the same stage of civilisation as the English people; their standard of living is much lower; their education is greatly inferior; and they tend to cling to their own tongue and to cohere in masses in the strange land to which they have come. All this makes them difficult to assimilate, and because of that even Britain has had to face an agitation for their total exclusion. Yet the greater elements of danger in the Australian case are absent here. After all, the alien immigration into England of all kinds is only 12,400 a year, and the people among whom they come to live are 40,000,000. The aliens are, consequently, not nearly numerous enough to alter the type of civilisation which prevails. Moreover, they are mainly exiles driven from their homes by persecution, and they neither could nor would form the advance guard of an armed invasion. Lastly, their religion is, in all its higher aspects, related to English religion, and there is a large community of English Jews thoroughly assimilated to their environment, who are eager to help in the education and assimilation of the backward members of their race.

* Cf. “Daily Mail" Year Book, 1906, p. 67.

Consequently, even this immigration is a harmless thing compared with the immigration of Asiatic labourers and artisans into Australia. To find a fitting parallel to that, we have to go back, as we have said, to the great migrations of the peoples of Europe and Asia in the fourth and fifth centuries. This may seem to some a far-fetched and improbable analogy, but it is the only one that is adequate. It is quite possible for social movements which belonged, as we thought, only to a vanished past to be still with us in new forms, but with their essential character unchanged. That appears to be undoubtedly the case here. Australia is endeavouring to ward off national migrations of the ancient type, more peaceful in appearance but equally tending to lower the standard of living and to displace our own people in their own land. Moreover, now, as then, there are lowering clouds of war in the background. If that or anything like it be true, it surely is the case that the Australian determination to exclude Asiatic immigrants is founded on a deep-rooted instinct of self-preservation."*

ढ

IV. Parallel between Migrations of Nations in 4th Century A.D. and Migrations now.

In the old days the migrations arose and proceeded thus. Either their own increase made the land of some of the non-Roman races outside the Empire too small for them, or they had ambitious kings who longed for conquest, or they were pressed upon by other races stronger than they. Under one of these influences, or a combination of them, they sought new homes, and found them by the simple process of overwhelming some neighbouring people more civilised but weaker than themselves. These they slew in large part; the rest they reduced to servitude; and inevitably they brought down the level of life for all to the low standard they were accustomed to. Thus they made an end for a time of literature and intellectual advance, and much

*"Round Table Magazine," February, 1911, p. 127.

else that was precious. Sometimes, however, they came as suppliants, and in that case the Roman Empire was faced by much the same problem as Australia would be if free access were given to coloured men.

The most instructive example of this, and the one most weighty with warning to us, is the admission of the Visigoths in 376 A.D. under the Emperor Valens to Moesia (the country now occupied by Servia and Bulgaria). Having been suddenly attacked and broken by the ferocious Huns, the defeated Visigoths, to the number of 200,000 men, with their women and children, sought to pass the Danube. In his ornate prose,* Gibbon tells the instructive story how they implored the Emperor to permit them to cultivate the waste lands of Thrace, and declared that they would " ever hold themselves bound, by the strongest obligations of duty and gratitude, to obey the laws, and to guard the limits of the republic." Valens and his councillors were not farsighted enough to meet the crisis adequately. They saw only the immediate gain of a new source for recruiting, and thereby they brought ruin upon the State. Gibbon continues, page 380:-" But most experienced statesman of Europe has never been summoned to consider the propriety, or the danger, of admitting or rejecting an innumerable multitude of barbarians, who are driven by despair or hunger to solicit a settlement on the territories of a civilised nation. When that important proposition, so essentially connected with the public safety, was referred to the Ministers of Valens, they were perplexed and divided; but they soon acquiesced in the flattering sentiment which seemed the most favourable to the pride, the indolence, and the avarice of their sovereign. They dissembled or disregarded the terrors of this national emigration, so extremely different from the partial and accidental colonies, which had been received on the extreme

the

"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Chap. 26,

p. 379.

limits of the Empire. But they applauded the liberality of fortune," which gave them an army and the opportunity of taking for the Emperor's use the money they were receiving from those who were unwilling to serve. But they had some glimmering of the danger they were incurring. They saw that if they were to be secure they must Romanise the new-comers, so "it was insisted that their children should be taken from them and dispersed throughout the provinces of Asia, where they might be civilised by the arts of education." They saw, also, that with the Ostrogoths, kinsmen of the Visigoths, pressing down upon the Danube they must deprive the immigrants of their arms. But corrupt officials were bribed and let them keep their arms; then trouble arose between the people and the newcomers. The Emperor led an army against them. Thereupon they opened the passage of the Danube to the Ostrogoths, and together the two tribes wasted the land with fire and sword. That in those days was the result of permitting unassimilable aliens to Occupy waste lands for the sake of an immediate gain.

In our time the migration of nations accomplishes itself in a more peaceful fashion, but in the end it may be fully as destructive, especially in the circumstances of Australia. We have, so near us in Asia that we may say they are on our border, hundreds of millions of Indians, Chinese and Japanese, all of whom are living in countries so far crowded that 10,000 of them (let us be moderate) would be glad each year to find fresh fields in new and comparatively empty lands, where pioneering had been done and à stable government established. These people would willingly accept any invitation given them, or any hint even that they would not be unwelcome, to come and occupy and cultivate our waste lands as the Goths offered to do in Moesia. If it were not for the White Australia policy they would come, and what would be the certain result?