"May I enquire," said Mr. Moffatt, "the source you would propose?"
"It is immaterial which," replied Brown; "whatever would be found the most advantageous, the people that would be most industrious, and whose labour could be obtained at the cheapest rate of wage. I have often been at a loss to understand why the Victorian government has adopted such stringent laws to endeavour to keep the Chinese out of Melbourne. They are essentially an industrious class of people, and just the very sort of men we want; they make excellent shepherds, more attentive to their work than Europeans, less difficult to please in their rations, and can be obtained at far less wages."
"I can enlighten you," said the wool-buyer, "if you are ignorant as to the reason of the Victorian people desiring a restriction on the immense influx of Chinese immigrants. They have been landed in that colony in thousands, and may be said, though forming an integral part of our population, to be a distinct people and nation. They speak their own language only, have their own religion, are proverbially the laziest, filthiest, and most immoral people contained in the state, and come without their females. So that they do not settle amongst us; but those that are sufficiently fortunate to make money return with their gains to their own country to excite the avarice of their countrymen; while those that are not successful are left to starve and die, or commit depredations on our settlers. They swarm together in large numbers in small tenements in our large towns; and, by their vice and filth, generate noisome diseases amongst themselves, and pestilence in the neighbourhood in which they live; and their abodes and their persons are alike mephitic. They are in fact the scum of our population, and far more degraded even than the denizens of the vilest purlieus of Britain's metropolis. They, as doubtless you are aware, live and migrate in large bodies, from one to other of the diggings, blighting each locality in their transient passage, as swarms of locusts. They stab one another, and commit murder amongst themselves, of which the authorities never hear. They commit depredations on the whites, for which they are never punished from the difficulty in detecting the delinquent; and, as I said before, they spread disease wherever they go. They are therefore no benefit to the country; for, with the exception of rice and opium, they consume no mercantile commodities, but annually drain a considerable quantity of gold from it. It is considering these facts, and that they are filling places that could be advantageously occupied by our own countrymen, that the colonists of Victoria have attempted to restrict their entrance into the country, by the exaction of a ten pound poll-tax. I am only sorry to see that the example is not followed by the other colonies, for while Victoria stands alone, she will never succeed in keeping the evil away."