PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION F. 611 



patriots in the United Kingdom was David Hume, the philosopher, 

 deist, and historian. 



Mr. James also, with equal lack of discrimination, objects to East 

 Indians because " they hawk through the country districts cheap 

 fancy goods mostly rubbish ; " as if all white men were above suspicion 

 of being hawkers, cheats, and loafers. Our attention must not be 

 diverted by these manifestly irrelevant and exaggerated charges against 

 British Indians from the supreme question, viz., " Are the fabulous 

 agricultural riches of three-fourths of Australia to remain undeveloped 

 and neglected to gratify a senseless whim that the colored races, who 

 alone can accomplish the task effectively, should be rigidly excluded 

 from the very parallels of latitude to which they practically belong by 

 birth, and in which they alone are capable of open-air work without 

 risk of fatal disease ? " 



The only answer Mr. James dare venture to make to this is a feeble 

 assertion — not only without a particle of proof but in audacious defiance 

 of centuries crowded with evidence of the mart}Tdom of whites by a 

 climate to which they were not indigenous, in India, the West Indies, 

 and other tropical and sub-tropical countries — a climate which tends 

 to sweep all btit colored races into a premature grave. Mr. James 

 can only reply— " Australians believe that white labor can people 

 this country, and have strong grounds on which to base that belief. 

 The assumption that the white man cannot live and work there equally 

 as well as the black or the yellow is perfectly gratuitous." But not 

 the faintest attempt does he make to substantiate this false affirma- 

 tion. The attitude of Mr. James in this matter is as absurd as if he 

 were to deny the whole vast accumulation of evidence in support of 

 the Copernican theory that the earth revolves round the sun, and 

 as if he were to cling, at all hazards, to the ancient and defunct Ptole- 

 maic system of astronomy. He strives to uphold the long-exploded 

 theory that the white man is just as well suited to bear tropical heat 

 as the man of color by quoting Mr. Gregory, formerly of the Melbourne 

 University, but now Professor of Geology in the University of Glasgow. 

 Equally in gratuitous contradiction of a long array of irrefutable proofs, 

 the professor contends that " there seems to be no adequate reason 

 why Australia should not in time all be occupied by white races." 

 But this assertion is unsupported by an atom of proof. The professor 

 fears the invasion of " an Asiatic deluge," if the artificial legislative 

 I)arriers now erected against it be removed. But protection from such 

 an imaginary disaster could be effectually provided, as already stated, 

 by legally restricting Asiatic immigrants to their own latitudes, and 

 by having the management of large tropical and sub-tropical agri- 

 cultural undertakings promoted by white capitalists and superintended 

 by men of the same race. It is wholly by raising evasive issues, ex- 

 pedient fallacies, and mean equivocations that the vital question of 

 this controversy is shirked. These evasive issues include the alleged 

 unreliability of colored workers in defending the country from attack, 

 and the denial of the proved impossibility of developing the latent 

 "wealth of the Australian heat-belt by white labor. 



