laws became party planks. British Columbia got round it by a
subterfuge. She had the Ottawa government rush through an
order-in-council known as "the direct passage" law. All Orientals at
that time were coming in by way of Hawaii. Ships direct from India
were not sailing. They stopped at Hong Kong and Hawaii. The
order-in-council was to forbid the entrance of Brown Brothers unless in
direct passage from their own land. That effectually barred the Hindu
out, till recently when a Japanese line, to test the Direct Passage
Act, brought a shipload of Hindus direct from India to Vancouver.
Vancouverites patrolled docks and would not let them land. A head tax
of five hundred dollars was leveled at John Chinaman. That didn't keep
John Chinaman out. It simply raised his wages; for the Chinese boss
added to the new hand's wages what was needed to pay the money loaned
for entrance fee. A special arrangement was made with the Mikado's
government to limit Japanese emigration to a few hundreds given
passports, but California went the whole length of demanding the total
exclusion of Brown Brothers.

Why? What was the Pacific Coast afraid of? When the State Departments
of the United States and Canada met the State Department of the Mikado,
practically what was said was this. Only in very diplomatic language:

Whiteman: "We don't object to your students and merchants and
travelers, but what we do object to is the coolies. We are a
population of a few hundred thousands in British Columbia, of less than
three million in the states of the Pacific. What with Chink and Jap
and Hindu, you are hundreds of millions of people. If we admit your
coolies at the present rate (eleven thousand had tumbled into one city
in a few months), we shall presently have a coolie population of
millions. We don't like your coolies any better than you do yourself!