Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/195

Rh the complete absence of immigration into China, is striking evidence of the redundancy of the population; for, though that emigration is almost wholly confined to two provinces, viz., Kwangtung and Fookien, representing together a population of probably from 34,000,000 to 35,000,000, 1 am disposed to think that a number nearer 3,000,000 than 2,000,000 from these provinces alone are located in foreign countries. In the kingdom of Siam it is estimated that there are at least 1,500,000 Chinese, of which 200,000 are in the capital (Bankok). They crowd all the islands of the Indian Archipelago. In Java, we know by correct census there are 136,000. Cochin-China teems with Chinese. In this colony we are seldom without one, two, or three vessels taking Chinese emigrants to California and other places. Multitudes go to Australia, to the Philippines, to the Sandwich Islands, to the western coast of Central and Southern America; some have made their way to British India. The emigration to the British West Indies has been considerable, to the Havanna greater still. The annual arrivals in Singapore are estimated at an average of 10,000, and 2,000 is the number that are said annually to return to China."

"There is not only this enormous maritime emigration, but a considerable inland efflux of Chinese toward Manchuria and Thibet; and it may be added that the large and fertile islands of Formosa and Hainan have been to a great extent won from the aborigines by successive inroads of Chinese settlers. Now these are all males; there is not a woman to 10,000 men; hence, perhaps, the small social value of the female infant. Yet the perpetual outflowing of people seems in no respect to diminish the number of those who are left behind."

Sir John Bowring not only testifies to this perpetual outflow of Chinese emigrants, but he paints in vivid colors the causes which lead to these results. He says: "There is probably no part of the world in which the harvests of mortality are more sweeping and destructive than in China, producing voids which require no ordinary appliances to fill up. Multitudes perish absolutely from want of the means of existence; inundations destroy towns and villages, and all their inhabitants; it would not be easy to calculate the loss of life by the typhoons and hurricanes which visit the coasts of China, in which boats and junks are sometimes sacrificed by hundreds and by thousands. The late civil wars in China must have led to the loss of millions of lives. The sacrifices of human beings by executions alone are frightful."

It is such a condition of things, and such causes as these, that induce the laboring classes of Chinese to emigrate to other countries. Considering the incentive which exists in these densely populated districts to escape from the misery which marks their existence, and to seek new lands where their condition may be