all the best jade goes to Peking, in point of workmanship the palm must be given to Soochow.'

These results are exhibited in manifold beautiful objects of use and ornament. What the bamboo is to the ordinary Chinaman, providing him as it does with almost every imaginable article required by the social conditions of China, that jade is to the connoisseur and man of refinement, if within somewhat narrower limits. It has been made into snuff-bottles, cups, plates, bows, bracelets, earrings, vases, boxes, inkstones, flutes, pestles and mortars, seals, ear-stoppers, sceptres (so-called), pillows, boats, hairpins, rings, head ornaments, paper-weights, Buddhas, human figures, beasts, birds, fishes, etc., etc. It is recorded in an account of Ch'ang-an, formerly the capital of China, that because the Lady Li, favourite of the day (second century B.C.), scratched her head with a jade pin, all the ladies of the harem must necessarily have jade pins to scratch their heads with, and that consequently the price of jade was rapidly doubled. Another work tells us of a jade whip presented to the Emperor, of such flexibility that its two ends could be made to touch. Elsewhere we read of two bowls which would revolve one within the other, but could not be separated-evidently an anticipation of the familiar breakfast-dish. The great Mongol general, Bayan, while digging a well at Khoten, is said to have come across a statue of Buddha three or four feet in height; also a block of white jade, too big to be carried away. In the account of Ch'ang-an, quoted above, there is a note on a green jade lamp-stand 7 feet 5 in. in height, with five branches, around each of which was coiled a dragon, holding a lamp in its mouth.

Ear-stoppers of jade are mentioned in the Odes. Some Chinese commentators think that they were worn merely for ornament, but it seems quite probable that they were intended to keep out dust.

Occasionally a stanza of poetry is carved on a jade saucer or snuff-bottle, and if the object is very old and has been much used, the characters are often difficult to decipher. In such cases a little Indian ink, smeared over and then lightly rubbed off, will cause the writing to stand out clearly.

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Of all forms into which jade has been wrought, the most interesting perhaps is that popularly and inaccurately known as the 'sceptre.' In shape it is something like an elongated S laid on its side, with a well-defined hilt and guard, like those of a sword; and its Chinese name is ju i as you wish. It is a common form of present between well-to-do persons. Davis says, 'That it had a religious origin seems indicated by the sacred flower of the lotus being generally carved on the superior end.' Franks calls it 'the sceptre of longevity.' The gist, however, of all that the Chinese have to say on the subject may be briefly summed up. The earliest

mention of the ju i in Chinese literature seems to be an allusion in a biography of a statesman who died in A.D. 243, after which the term becomes fairly well known; but it is not until the thirteenth century that any writer discusses it from an archæological point of view. In a work of that date we read, 'The men of old used the ju i for pointing or indicating, and also for guarding themselves against the unforeseen. It was made of wrought iron, and was over two feet in length, ornamented with patterns in silver either inlaid or overlaid. Of late years, branches of trees, which have grown into the shape required, and also pieces of bamboo, highly polished to resemble jade, and prepared without the aid of hatchet or awl, have been very much in vogue.'

In support of the first clause of the above, we find in history such passages as (fifth century): The Emperor pointed at him with his ju i, and said'; 'The Emperor rapped on the table with his ju i in token of approbation,' &c.

With reference to the material used for the ju i, we further read of jade, gold, rhinoceros-horn, bone, red sandal-wood, crystal, and amber; and from the employment of several of these substances it must be inferred that the ju i had already ceased to be a weapon of defence against the unforeseen.' The prevalence of the lotus-flower as a decoration is due of course to the influence of Buddhism, but is scarcely sufficient evidence of 'a religious origin.'

A ju i of dark green jade, 17 inches in length, was recently sold by Mr. J. C. Stevens for eleven guineas. Such a piece might easily be worth 100 guineas in China.

A fitting conclusion to this desultory note may be found in a verse by an old Chinese poet :

Here is beautiful jade,

There is a skilled artisan;

The man is all to the stone,

The stone is as naught to the man.

HERBERT A. GILES.

Vol. LV-No. 323

L

A WHITE AUSTRALIA: WHAT IT MEANS

To the mind of Australians it is abundantly clear that the significance of the reasons which led them to adopt their national watchword, 'A White Australia for the Race,' has not yet been fully grasped by their brothers of the blood beyond the seas. The Press of Great Britain seems unable to sympathise with the vehemence of Antipodean feeling in this regard, and her statesmen-with some notable exceptions-profess amazement at what they consider the arrogance of a handful of white men, most of whom are clustered on the eastern fringe of a vast and partially-explored continent, in attempting to stem the tide of foreign immigration, which until a comparatively recent period was allowed to flow freely towards their shores. In Australia and New Zealand, on the other hand, both the people and their Parliaments are united in regarding the policy of excluding undesirable aliens as one of more vital importance than the settlement of the tariff or any other national question. Come what may, they are determined to realise the ideals on which the Commonwealth was founded, to prevent any large infiltration of alien elements into the component parts of their national life, and to preserve pure for ever the British stock with which they started. This is no sudden furore, no mere party cry. From the sun-baked expanse of the Northern Territory to Tasmania, 'The Garden of the South,' across the continent from Sydney to Perth, round a coast line of 8,000 miles, and over a thousand miles of the South Pacific to the snow-capped mountains of New Zealand, comes the voice of a new nation—insignificant in point of numbers, but unalterably resolved that the Commonwealth shall be established on the firm basis of unity of race, so as to enable it to fulfil the designs of its founders' stern men with empire in their brains'—and enjoy to the fullest extent their charter of liberty under the Crown.

Australians are so fully alive to the imperious necessity of increasing the number of their populations, that they spare no efforts to attract desirable emigrants from European countries. To every man whose standard of living and general social tone are not inferior to their own, they freely offer of their best. Land is sold or leased on generous terms, and bonuses will be given to encourage the pro

motion of new industries. Practically, but one condition is imposed -the new arrivals must not be markedly inferior in morale to the present possessors, who regard themselves merely as holding a distant outpost of civilisation for the benefit of their descendants and their equals.

Australia occupies a unique position among the nations. It is an island, lying far from the populated centres of the Old World and in close proximity to Java and the teeming millions of Southern and Eastern Asia, who at any time may bear down in flood upon the scanty forces of the defenders. These pent-up myriads are at present in a state of unrest, and there are evidences of a distinct inclination on their part to break bounds and descend upon the coasts of the great southern land. On the north-eastern shores of the continent they have already broken through the thin red line of the British, and have firmly established themselves in the country beyond. Thursday Island, which stands at the northern entrance of the passage between the Great Barrier Reef and the shores of Queensland, has been styled the Gibraltar of Australia, and large sums of money have been spent by the Imperial and Australian Governments in fortifying it. Since it became open to the Eastern nations, the Japanese have discovered twenty different channels through the reef, by any one of which they could avoid the forts and gain an entrance to the sea within the barrier. A few years ago there were 2000 Europeans on Thursday Island, engaged in the pearl-shelling industry; but they were gradually elbowed out until to-day they number less than 100.

The late Professor C. H. Pearson, at one time Minister for Education in Victoria, and one of the most intellectual statesmen who ever resided in Australia, in his National Life and Character, admirably summarised the dangers to which his adopted country was exposed by reason of its situation, and the motives which actuated the various colonial Governments in passing enactments designed to place some restriction on the wholesale flooding of their territories.

The fear of Chinese immigration which the Australian democracy cherishes, and which Englishmen at home find it hard to understand, is, in fact, the instinct of self-preservation, quickened by experience. We know that coloured and white labour cannot exist side by side; we are well aware that China can swamp us with a single year's surplus of population; and we know that if national existence is sacrificed to the working of a few mines and sugar plantations, it is not the Englishmen in Australia alone, but the whole civilised world that will be the losers. Transform the northern half of our continent into a Natal, with thirteen out of fourteen belonging to an inferior race, and the southern half will speedily approximate to the condition of the Cape Colony, where the whites are indeed a masterful minority, but still only as one in four. We are guarding the last part of the world in which the higher races can live and increase freely for the higher civilisation. It is idle to say that if all this should come to pass our pride of place will not be humiliated. We are struggling among ourselves for supremacy in a world which we thought as destined to belong to the Aryan race and to the

Christian faith, to the letters and arts and charm of social manners which we have inherited from the best times of the past. We shall wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs.

If it were necessary to reinforce this impressive warning by drawing a lesson from the past, it might be shown that Australia is not the first instance on record of a Mongolian irruption. Once before-in prehistoric times, if the theories of craniologists are to be trusted-the yellow peoples overflowed their boundaries and never stopped until they reached the western shores of Ireland, leaving many a grave and grassy barrow of their dead in the British Isles to attest how irresistible was their onset. Ab uno disce omnes.

According to the last census, the population of the six Federated States of Australia-including aborigines-is 3,771,715, of whom only 1,307,809 are males over fifteen years of age, so that barely one million have reached manhood's estate. The same statistics show that there are 33,231 Chinese resident in the Commonwealth, in addition to many thousands of Japanese, Kanakas, Javanese, Cingalese, Malays, and a motley horde of other coloured races, the total being estimated at 100,000. New South Wales, Queensland, and the Northern Territory, being the regions lying nearest the invaders, have suffered most severely from their irruption, Queensland alone showing an increase of over seven thousand since the last census. Exclusive of aborigines, the yellow and brown races constitute 10.95 per thousand of the population of New South Wales and 47-59 per thousand in Queensland, while in the Northern Territory they have more than gained a footing; they are in an absolute majority. The Chinese influx into Victoria reached its maximum in 1859, when they numbered 45,000; since that year they have gradually diminished to about 7000. These 45,000, however, did not leave Australia. The greater part of them lived their lives out among the whites and died beneath the Southern Cross, leaving behind them their dry bones for transhipment to China, and a tribe of hybrid descendants.

Under favourable conditions, the future Australian race should be a blend of the four constituents which make up the population of Great Britain, and it may be that in two or three generations hence it will be difficult to find under the Southern Cross anyone of pure English or Scottish descent whose family has been a hundred years on Australian soil. There is much intermarriage between the different British elements, and this is leading rapidly to the welding of the various colonists and their descendants into a homogeneous whole. A small German element, more noticeable in South Australia and Queensland than in the other States, may be disregarded, as it is ' Coghlan, Government Statist, New South Wales, 1901-2.