232 A HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF VICTORIA 



seven votes to twenty-four, and amongst the dissentient were 

 Graham Berry and no ]ess than nine ex-Ministers. It is to be 

 noted that of the prominent Irishmen, Sir Bryan O'Loghlen and 

 Sir John O'Shanassy loyally supported Mr. Francis. Mr. John 

 Gavan Duffy and Mr. Francis Longmore, the two ex-Ministers who 

 had signed, absented themselves from the division. 



Perhaps the most prominent political event of this period was 

 the revival of a groundless clamour for anti-Chinese legislation. 

 The antipathy manifested by the working classes in Victoria to the 

 Chinese is undoubtedly based upon fear of the effect their presence 

 may have on the wages question. The real issue has been much 

 mixed up with denunciations of the demoralising effect which the 

 community would suffer from their squalid habits of life, their 

 heathen vices, their gambling, opium smoking and debauchery. 

 There was never at any time grounds for really believing that mis- 

 cegenation could leave its stamp upon the colonists. The number of 

 European women who would look favourably upon a matrimonial 

 alliance with a Chinaman was and is infinitesimal. Nor was there 

 any justification for the oft-repeated platform statement that the 

 yellow man would soon become an aggravated repetition of the 

 negro problem in the Southern States of the American Union. As 

 a matter of fact the Chinaman did not come to stay. His love of the 

 Flowery Land, the obligations of his religion for despite all sneers 

 to the contrary he had a religion under which morality mixed with 

 superstition laid upon him very binding obligations required him to 

 return to the land where his ancestors were buried as soon as he 

 could. And towards that end he laboured diligently. The Chinese 

 labourer in Australia is mainly represented by the Cantonese, per- 

 haps the least favourable specimens of their countrymen. As a 

 rule, under British Government he is found to be inoffensive, peace- 

 able and law-abiding ; patient under oppression, uncomplaining and 

 philosophically fatalistic. By plodding industry and assiduous at- 

 tention to work, he will coax a yield from nature and make money 

 off a tiny plot of land which a white man would scorn to own. 

 His work in this one direction alone was of enormous benefit to the 

 colonists, and of vital consequence to their health in the early days. 

 His wages were honestly earned, but because of his success he was 



