Chinese seen as Yellow Peril

Saturday, 19 December 2009 00:00

December 19, 1917. When large numbers of workers from China were proposed to meet a labour shortage during the First World War, the Toronto Weekly Sun echoed a widely held xenophobic aversion to "Asiatics," sounded the "yellow peril threat," and expressed concern about the number of all "aliens" in Canada.

In the United States it has been proposed that Chinese Coolies be brought in by the hundreds of thousands, as a means of meeting the demands for farm labour. If the door is opened to admit the yellow man for the purpose of tilling the land, there will arise an irresistible demand for admission of the same sort of labourers for service in building sewers, work on railways and docks and in factories.

Indeed the door seems already to have been partly opened to these Asiatics, in Canada at least. When in Welland the other day, I was told that 400 Chinese had been brought in to work in one factory in that city. In British Columbia, according to press dispatches, there is fear that, following upon the draining of the Anglo Saxon manpower for war, the whole coast may pass into possession of the Orientals. If the invasion of the yellow men is to continue, yellow women will follow and in a few years we shall find ourselves faced in Canada with a problem similar to that which has been created in the Southern States.

But the yellow problem is not the only race problem which we are being brought up against in Canada. In the city of Welland… one fourth of the population is said to be made up of people of alien speech, mostly Greeks, Italians and natives of the Balkan states. In Guelph, between the city proper and the Agricultural College there is a considerable settlement in which the English tongue is hardly ever heard. When the late E.F. Clarke was mayor of Toronto, it was said that he could, on walking from his home on Bathurst Street to the city hall, greet by the first name every second man he met. If the most popular mayor Toronto ever had were alive today, and if he walked over that same route, he would meet over at least a third of the distant, men who would not even understand the tongue in which he addressed them.

Similar conditions are found in every urban centre in Ontario. It is going to be a tremendous task to assimilate this alien mass even under the best of circumstances; it is going to be an almost impossible task if the whole of our young Anglo-Saxon manhood is to be sacrificed in European war.