There may not be so much sedition among the Hindus of British Columbia as among Canadian-born Socialists, who rant of the flag as “a bloody rag”; but our Socialistic seditionists have never yet been accused of collecting two million dollars to send home to India to buy rifles for the revolution.  Canadian Socialists have never yet collected one dime to buy rifles.  These are not my accusations.  They are accusations that have been in the very air of Vancouver and San Francisco.  If they are true, they ought to be proved true.  If they are untrue, they ought to be proved untrue; but in view of the shoutings over patriotism and of Hopkinson’s assassination, they come with a rude jar to claims grounded on loyalty.  Could Hindus who landed in British Columbia destitute a few years ago possibly have that amount of money among them?  At last census they had property in Vancouver alone to the amount of six million dollars, held collectively for the whole community.

Their vices may be no worse than the vices of the low whites, but if immigration officials find that whites low or high have vices, those whites are excluded, be they English, Irish, Scotch, or Greek.

The Hindus are British subjects, but Canada does not admit British subjects unless she wants them—­unless they can give a clean bill of health and morals.

Canada does not regard admission as a right to any race, European, Asian, African.  She considers her citizenship a privilege and reserves to herself the right to extend or not to extend that privilege to whom she will.

That separation from families will excuse base and lewd morals is a view that Canada will never admit.  Her sons go forth unaccompanied by wives or sisters to lumber camps and mines and pioneer shacks, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred come back clean as they went forth, and manlier.  That women should be victims on an altar of lust is an argument that may appeal to the Asiatic—­the sentiment all draped in wisteria and lilies, of course; but it isn’t an argument that will prove anything in Canada but the advocate’s unfitness for citizenship.

What reason have Canadians to point the finger of reproach at the institution of the child wife, when the age of marriage in one province is low as twelve?  And that brings up the whole question of the child wife.  Because one province has the marriage age criminally low does not prove that that province approves of marriages at twelve.  In the whole history of that province marriages at that age have been as rare as the pastime of skinning a man alive, and that province has no specific law against skinning a man alive.  It has no such law because that type of crime is unknown.  But can it be said that the institution of child marriage is an unknown or even a rare crime in India?  The Hindu wives for whom loud outcry is being made are little girls barely eight years of age, whom before marriage the husbands have