The Idaho World

CHINESE LABOR IN NEW YORK.

One thousand Chinese laborers have been engaged to work upon the construction of the Midland railroad in Central, Southern and Western New York. This is believed to be the first experiment yet made in any of the Eastern or Middle States with these people and if continued swarms of the "Celestials" keep coming from the parent hive of China, the almond-eyed Mongolian will speedily become the curse to the laboring classes they already have become in California,—are rapidly becoming in Oregon, Idaho, and all over the Pacific coast. The hordes of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Alaric and other barbarian leaders who swept over different parts of Europe as with the besom of destruction and overthrew imperial Rome, were insignificant, numerically, to the millions with which China can to-day inundate North America and never feel their loss or miss their number at home. It is true their immigration is of a pacific nature, entirely Pacific in its character for that matter, but the greatest consequences are certain to flow from this continued policy of the American people. China contains to-day a population variously estimated at from four hundred and fifty million to four hundred and ninety millions of people, and is one of the largest and most populous Empires on the face of the earth. Immigration of these people is now taking place amounting to an average of 1,500 souls per month or 18,000 per year and increasing as rapidly as means for transportation offer. Koopmanschap, one agent, was understood to have entered into contracts for at least 100,000 Chinese laborers chiefly in the Southern and Western States. This is pre-eminently an age of railroad building, and the prevailing mania is to employ Chinese laborers in their construction. They next gravitate naturally into manufacturing establishments, farming and domestic labor. Wherever they go and obtain a foothold, as in California, they will as surely root out and supplant the poorer classes of white people as they have everywhere done and are now doing all over the Pacific coast. They are an inferior race, so created,—pagans,—and neither have nor can have anything in common with the white race, in customs, manners, modes of thought, or as an element of strength to American society, or to our institutions of Government. While an All Wise God has made of one blood all nations and people upon earth, He has also in His infinite wisdom created certain demarcation lines in color, and capacity, and characteristics which will ever remain as distinct and well defined as He has originally created them. There can neither by absorption, miscegenation, affiliation or mongrel hybridism, much more between these various races than in the case of the mule. Like the amalgamation of the Caucasian race with the aborigine of America, all such attempts will prove abortive, and are as false in theory as debasing and degrading to the superior race in practice. Yet the experiment will be tried of introducing these people like the locusts of Egypt in number into and all over our country. Some future day it may be repented of in sack cloth and ashes. Let them press on then with their blood and muscle, bone and sinew in countless hordes to wage the irrepressible conflict between capital and labor, bound to come, and if the capitalist engineers are "hoist by their own petard," so be it. The poorer classes of whites will be found to go elsewhere to newer countries where they can find room to breathe, and abundant labor to perform, and reap the reward of their own labors. Still, the future will come when the problem of the wisdom of this movement must be solved.