not compete. No doubt China could furnish a class equally poverty-stricken, who could outlive these slum-dwellers on their own terms; but these people have not funds for the journey. It remains for the Chinese peasant to seek importation as an indentured laborer, bound to work for five years in return for his passage; and this experiment was tried in Trinidad and Guiana, but proved a troublesome matter. Sometimes the planter would receive a consignment of peasants, sometimes of criminals; and the natives were uneasy, and resentful of the newcomers. In each colony about five thousand of these coolies remained to settle, but, in such half-occupied places, there was land enough for all.

When the importation of coolies from India was prohibited, in some islands a few capitalists pleaded for Chinese indentured labor in their place; but the suggestion was frowned down by the Government and by public opinion. The incoming Chinese are, therefore, those who can afford to make the journey without Government assistance. Here, as elsewhere, the yellow man arrives first as a trader - that is, as an immigrant of a slightly better class, who does not care to try field labor in competition with the blacks. Not all of these traders are rich, for, with a strong sense of national solidarity, a wealthy Chinese will import three or four of his countrymen, lending them money enough to satisfy immigration laws of a too stringent Government. Once arrived, they turn, one and all, to trade as a means of livelihood. Not many of them own large shops. A big business implies a knowledge of European markets, which they do not possess. A few have shops in the best streets, where they sell Chinese goods only, but most of them are humble dealers in provisions.

Now between the whites and the

peasants stand the half-breeds, the quadroons and mulattoes, with men of darker skin, who form a natural middle class. They work in the towns as artisans of all descriptions, and are generally much more successful than the Negroes; they are mechanics, motor men, clerks, supervisors, skilled employees of all kinds. Their great objective is to rise into the position held by the whites, and, in fact, the best of them often, by dint of money or brains, succeed in entering learned professions. In the country districts they own a good deal of land, and live in a manner very much above the peasantry. The mulatto farmer, though poor, is generally an employer of labor. In some islands many of the larger estates have passed into the hands of 'colored' or quadroon owners, who then live, as far as possible, like their neighbors, the white landlords. Their easiest and most usual method of rising in the world is, however, by trade, and it is here that they come into conflict with the Chinese.

In every West Indian village stands a small shop, generally one only, and it seems incredibly small to deal with the trade of such a fertile district. The shop is shaped like a large box, its front open to the road, with a counter running across, a few shelves, and a small storeroom at the back. Above these are the tiny rooms that serve as dwelling for the owner; and at the back is a 'yard' of trodden earth, such as surrounds the peasant's house, edged with palm-thatched hovels. From this emporium are sold the bread, salt fish, and other foodstuffs needed by the district, and here are purchased the surplus crops grown by the small settlers in their grounds. Trade is generally brisk. Such a store does not require any large amount of capital in the beginning. The prosperous Negro, if he knows something of figures, may

The most prosperous of storekeepers are the Chinese. They have a general reputation for honesty and for stocking sound goods. White people will deal with a Chinaman when they would not think of buying provisions from a shop of that size if it were kept by a Negro or a mulatto. The yellow man is a good buyer when he knows his market, and the petty, daily commerce of the countryside suits him exactly. It gives ample scope for his chief virtue thrift and for the scraping up of pennies, haggled for over handfuls of corn or berry coffee. He has just what the Negro lacks exactitude, and a patience that will carry him through work that would sicken a Creole. Once, during the Great War, a certain island ran short of maize meal, a staple foodstuff. The maize plant will grow in the West Indies, and its corn is used to feed poultry, but the meal is ground in the States. The island shopkeepers, as their stocks gave ut, sent their customers away, or tried to make them buy the more expensive wheat flour. A Chinaman, however, produced a hand mill and bought up sacks of local chicken food; then he and his family sat at the mill to grind, day and night, without stopping, until the little township was supplied with maize flour. What he made by this was known only to himself, but it was no excessive fee. The mulatto, when he makes money,

improves his style of living. He deserts his humble yard behind the shop and rents a wooden bungalow with a garden of palms and hibiscus. There he lives in the squalor and luxury of the middleclass West Indian, with chickens strolling in at his broken front door, and ragged servants to wait on him hand and foot. His wife must wear fine dresses, and cuts a figure in brown society; his children are sent to school. In short, he lives up to his income.

The Chinaman, when he grows rich, alters his mode of living not a whit. It is one of the chief traits which make the blacks wary regarding him that they can never be sure whether a Chinee is wealthy or not. It does not follow, however, that the Chinee puts his profits back into the business — on the contrary, the greater part of it is generally remitted to China. The capital amassed from some of these small shops must be very considerable. It is no uncommon thing for a man who came over with nothing to go home to a fortune of several thousand pounds, remitted year by year; but on the island his savings are concealed. The merchant brings over with him his wife and children, and they behave with the same restraint. Many a family that lives huddled in the diminutive rooms under the shop roof can produce at need silks, ivory, and robes worth a king's ransom.

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Usually a man will consider that it adds to his business prestige to wear European costume; so he wears tussore suit and straw hat that give him the air of a well-to-do colored chauffeur. The women are more conservative.

The first sign of rising fortune is not a large house, but a motor car. A carload of Chinese may be seen, the men wearing American suits, while the women, whose presence is a concession to English custom, look much out of place in their coats of heavy silk. An

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The women are often secluded guard doubly necessary in view of the contaminating influence of the blacks. The Negro has no moral code and no sense of etiquette, but he has the virtue of jolly good-fellowship. The Chinese, austere and dignified, is disgusted, as much as the European, at the looseness of the Negro domestic ties; but he cannot disregard the world he lives in. His social position is thus highly unpleasant. His wife, at any rate, must therefore be shut away in their tiny apartment, never to be seen except as a face at the window. There is, apparently, less restriction on daughters. European manners affect the second generation, and the poor man's child sits on the front step to stare at the road, while the rich man's daughter goes shopping in her car; yet they are, and remain, aliens, despising the Negroes around.

There are two or three families in the West Indies who claim to be people of rank in China. They are wealthy merchants, trading on a larger scale than most of their compatriots, from whom they hold aloof, as from inferiors. They are the most progressive part of the yellow community, they study English ways, and frequently send their children to Europe to school. Yet they form no slight part of the social problem of their race. The sons and daughters come home educated, fastidious, with traditions half of China, half of England, and they find no place prepared for them. They may not intermarry with the low-class Chinese; the Europeans patronize the girls and mistrust the men; while the quadroons or 'near-whites' will not compromise their doubtful position in society by

friendship with yellow people. The poorer colored folk are, of course, beneath their notice. They cannot even with any satisfaction return to China, for their income and half their interests are found in a British colony.

A peculiar result of this invasion is the Chinese mulatto. The MongolianNegroid is a hideous object, with the slant eyes and flat cheeks of his fathers, plus the skin, hair, and look of coarseness that come from the Negro stock. This type was never foreseen by Nature; it has neither the poise of the yellow man nor the physical completeness that makes the pure-blooded Negro such a sleek and handsome animal. These half-breeds are found even in colonies where the Chinese came in singly, bringing their families with them, but they are most numerous in Guiana, where, since 1850, batches of yellow men have been imported as coolies. These laborers, sprung from the lowest class, having with them no women of their own race, readily formed connections with Negresses.

If no great influx of Asiatics takes place, these half-castes will soon be absorbed in the dark population of Demerara. If a large Chinese colony should be formed, the presence of halfbreeds would be a source of weakness rather than strength. It is not likely that the Chinese would be more successful than the Europeans in preserving their purity of blood; and the history of South America demonstrates the difficulty, when once a class of halfbreeds has been formed, of preventing a complete fusion of race. Probably the Chinese, if they settled in the West Indies, would absorb so much 'color' that their racial type would be profoundly modified.

The Chinaman is, then, a useful person who does not compete with the ordinary black citizen, so that it is strange that he should be so persist

ently disliked. The West Indian world has room for men of all colors; it can welcome Englishmen, Spaniards, Jews, Negroes, Frenchmen, Syrians, and Hindus; the Chinese alone are regarded as interlopers, and their worst enemies are the blacks. Sir Harry Johnston notes: 'The Negroes are afraid of the Chinese, and do not behave to them in the bullying manner they sometimes adopt toward the East Indians.' But, collectively, the Negroes can terrorize individual Chinamen by riot and violence.

Baiting the Chinaman is an easy game. After the war, when Jamaica passed through a time of minor disorders, there were two anti-Chinese riots to one antiwhite demonstration, and Chinamen's shops were looted when white men's went untouched. To the Celestial, isolated in his wooden store, the island must have appeared a world of black barbarians. These outbursts, however, were sporadic; the natives cannot rise to a boycott. To parade through the village and rush the shop is an easy vengeance; it requires more self-control to decline to buy salt fish in the cheapest market. If the Chinese question grew acute, this might follow; but, meanwhile, everyone trades with Ah Sin.

If this dislike is based partly on an uneasy instinct that these strangers would make the world too strenuous for Quashie, it is also largely a simple jealousy of wealth. The peasantry tolerate a wealthy white man, but it irks them to see a man living as poorly as themselves, yet possessed of a large sum of capital. The profits sent to China are large, but they are exaggerated by popular report to a fantastic sum. The local papers complain that these aliens are draining the country of its wealth. They might reflect, however, that the great American companies carried off an enormously greater

amount, and that the entire tropical belt pays tribute to the North. Small, compared with these, is its tribute to China.

Loyalty to their homeland persists among the Celestials, even among those born on the Islands. Most of them intend to return home, and all have sympathies there. During the recent famine large sums were raised by them for the relief of their starving compatriots at home. When China was declared a republic, her leading citizens in Jamaica assembled and were photographed, in European costume, against the background of their new republican flag.

On the surface, they conform to the laws and even the customs enjoined by white rulers. Actually, they spread round them the influence of their own morals and ideas; and these seem to be especially unsuited to the Negro. Bars of doubtful repute, cellars that hide a gambling den, debts and disorders among the laborers - these are some of the results that follow the entry of the worst type of yellow trader. If his hold on the country were stronger, this side of the Celestial's nature might be more fully displayed. But he well realizes his precarious position, and he thinks the white man has a grudge against him, so he makes pathetic attempts to wind himself into favor. He cannot use the methods of his rival, the brown man, who writes to papers, and can make his complaint known to his superiors and even to Downing Street. Once, when the local papers were loudly demanding their expulsion, the Chinese community sought in vain for reply - no one would listen, if they managed to state their case, nor could they find anyone or anything to bribe. Just then somebody opened a fund for the Y. M. C. A. Instantly the Chinese subscribed to it, heavily, enthusiastically. This broad