Page:The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind.djvu/39

 Turkistan, not to add that the mischiefs likely to follow such a withdrawal would be greater than the difficulties which the presence of the conquerors at this moment causes. Men talked at one time of deporting the seven millions of negroes from the Southern States of America to Africa, but this utterly impracticable scheme has been dropped. The only case in which the question of preventing contact arises in a practical form is where immigrants of a Backward race are found swarming into a country already peopled by a European stock. Such a case has arisen in California and British Columbia, whither Chinese have migrated, as also in Australia as respects Chinese, and Japanese, and Indian coolies, and in Natal. In all these cases statutes have been passed intended to arrest or to limit the influx of the Backward race: and in California and Australia, where the methods have been most stringent, the desired result is being attained.

Our first impulse is to condemn such a course, partly because it is apt to be accompanied (as in California) by rough treatment of the strangers, partly because it seems prompted by scorn or hatred of a branch of our fellow men, partly because we have a feeling that the whole earth belongs to mankind as a whole, who should be suffered to move freely over it, and that restrictions on the natural movements of population are prima facie wrong. Nature may be supposed to know better than we do; and the efforts of man to check her have been often foolish and mostly ineffective. Yet the Californian and the Australian,