“If the Chinaman comes in here lowering the price of goods and the price of labor,” said the agitator a few years ago, “we’ll put a poll tax of five hundred dollars on and make him pay for his profit.”  The poll tax was put on every Chinaman coming into Canada, but do you think John Chinaman pays it?  It is a way that unjust laws have of coming back in a boomerang.  The Chinaman doesn’t pay it!  Mr. Canadian Householder paid it; for no sooner was the poll tax imposed than up went wages for household servant and laundryman and gardener, from ten to fifteen dollars a month to forty and forty-five and fifty dollars a month.  The Italian boss system came in vogue, when the rich Chinaman who paid the entrance tax for his “slaves” farmed out the labor at a profit to himself.  The system was really one of indentured slavery till the immigration authorities went after it.  Then Chinese benevolent associations were formed.  Up went wages automatically.  The cook would no longer do the work of the gardener.  When the boy you hired at twenty-five dollars had learned his job, he suddenly disappeared one morning.  His substitute explains he has had to go away; “he is sick;” any excuse; with delightful lapses of English when you ask questions.  You find out that your John has taken a job at forty dollars a month, and you are breaking in a new green hand for the Chinese benevolent association to send up to a higher job.  If you kick against the trick, you may kick!  There are more jobs than men.  That’s the way you pay the five hundred dollars poll tax; comical, isn’t it; or it would be comical if the average white householder did not find it five hundred dollars more than the average income can spare?  So the labor leaders chuckle at this subterfuge, as they chuckle at the “continuous” passage law.

For a time the indentured slavery system worked almost criminally; for if the newcomer, ignorant of the law and the language, got wise to the fact that his boss was doing what was illegal under Canadian law, and attempted to jump his serfdom, he was liable—­as one of them expressed it—­“to be found missing.”  It would be reported that he had suicided.  Among people who did not speak English, naturally, no details would be given.  It seems almost unbelievable that in a country wrestling with the whole Asiatic problem the fact has to be set down that the government has no interpreter among the Chinese who is not a Chinaman, no interpreter among the Japanese who is not a Jap.  As it chances, the government happens to have two reliable foreigners as interpreters; but they are foreigners.