en, twenty cents a day. Her people were literally
starving for the right to live. It does not matter much who acted as the
connecting link,--the sawmill owners, the canneries, the railroads, or
the steamships. The steamship lines and the sawmill men seem to have
been the combined sinners. The mills wanted labor. The steamship lines
saw a chance to transport laborers at the rate of twenty thousand a year
to and from India. The Hindus came tumbling in at the rate of six
thousand in a single year, when, suddenly, British Columbia, inert at
first, awakened and threatened to secede or throw the newcomers into the
sea. By intervention of the Imperial government and the authorities of
India a sort of subterfuge was rigged up in the immigration laws. The
Hindus had been booked to British Columbia via Hong Kong and Hawaii. The
most of the Japs had come by way of Hawaii. To kill two birds with one
stone, by order-in-council in Ottawa, the regulation was enacted
forbidding the admission of immigrants except on continuous passage from
the land of birth. Canada's immigration law also permits great latitude
in interpretation as to the amount of money that must be possessed by the
incoming settlers. Ordinarily it is fifty dollars for winter,
twenty-five dollars for summer, with a five hundred dollar poll tax
against the Chinaman. The Hindus were required to have two hundred and
fifty dollars on their person.

One wonders at the simplicity of a nation that hopes to fence itself in
safety behind laws that are pure subterfuge. The subterfuge has but
added irritation to friction. What was to hinder a direct line of
steamships going into operation any day? As a matter of fact, to force
the issue, to force the Dominion to declare the status of the Oriental, a
Japanese ship early in 1914 did come direct from India with a cargo of
angry armed Hindus demanding entrance. Canada refused to relent. The
ship lay in harbor for months unable to land its colonists, and a
Dominion cruiser patrolled Vancouver water to prevent actual armed
conflict. When the final decision ordered the colonists on board
deported, knives and rifles were brandished; and Hopkinson, the secret
service man employed by British authorities, was openly shot to death a
few weeks later in a Vancouver court room by a band of Hindu assassins.
"We are glad we did it," declared the murderers when arrested. Hopkinson
himself had come from India and was hated and fea