hat'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.

Said Doctor Munro, one of the medical staff of the Immigration
Department: "Even in complicated international negotiations, where each
country is jockeying to protect its rights, Canada has to depend on
representatives of China or Japan to translate state documents and
transmit state messages. Here we are on the verge of great commercial
intercourse with two of the richest countries in Asia, countries that are
just awakening from the century's sleep, countries that will need our
flour and our wheat and our lumber and our machinery; and we literally
have not a diplomatic body in Canada to speak either Chinese or Japanese.
I'll tell you what a lot of us would like to see done--what the southern
states are doing with the Latin-Spanish of South America--have a staff of
translators for our chambers of commerce and boards of trade, or price
files and lists of markets, etc. How could this be brought about? Let
Japan and China send yearly, say twenty students to study international
law and English with us. Let us send to China and Japan yearly twenty of
our postgraduate students to be trained up into a diplomatic body for our
various boards of trade, to forward international trade and help the two
countries to understand each other.

"When trouble arose over Oriental immigration a few years ago," continued
Doctor Munro, "I can tell you tha