1100 ADMINISTRATION AND LEGISLATION [PART V 
have declined to legislate regarding the provision of separate 
carriages on the railway for natives. If only this spirit is 
maintained, in a reasonable period the native element in 
the country will be assimilated; half-castes are steadily 
becoming amalgamated with the rest of the people; those 
Chinese who wish to remain permanently in the country 
have no difficulty in obtaining white women as wives, and 
they are appreciated as husbands, and, though there may be 
objections to the practice, they disappear when it is realized 
that the cases are numerically very few, that there is no 
question of perpetuating a really coloured population, and 
that a gradual process of intermingling is now wisest for all 
parties. The blood of the country will not be appreciably 
affected by such admixture, and the dangers of two wholly 
alien races will disappear. 
The chief difficulty, indeed, which will arise in the future is 
that of the employment of lascars in merchant shipping in 
Australasian waters, against which both Australia and New 
Zealand feel strongly, and which they desire to see extin- 
guished as far as the coasting trade at least is concerned.2 
In South Africa the position is different ; coloured immi- 
gration there does not threaten the purity of the race, but 
complicates the native problem, one of infinite and most 
regrettable complication, for which no solution is yet in sight. 
1911 were aimed at Asiatics in connexion with shearing of sheep, but were 
not passed. A New Zealand Bill of 1908 shared a like fate. 
! The sympathy shown in August 1911 with the Chinese in cases of 
isolated assaults in New South Wales, and in a case of the compulsory 
deportation of a Chinese wife who had been temporarily admitted (Age 
August 3) is significant of the change of feeling since immigration became 
rare. 
* See Parl. Pap., Cd. 3567, pp. 108-16; 5745, pp. 399-409 ; New Zealand 
Parl. Deb., eliii. 695-72, 835, 836, 871. The Queensland Royal Com- 
mission on pearl shell and béche de mer reported in 1908 (Report, p. 62) 
that white labour should be substituted for coloured labour in the fisheries, 
but no action has been taken; and in the Queensland Parliament in 1910 
it was urgently asserted that only by the aid of Japanese could the industry 
be pursued at all. These Japanese are permitted to enter for a temporary 
purpose only by the Commonwealth Government. See Parliamentary 
Debates, 1910, pp. 1585 seq. 
* See Mr, Malan in Cd. 5745, pp. 409, 410.