Degrading competition
But notwithstanding the favorable provisions of the Treaty it was found impossible for them to assimilate with our people. Then physical characteristics and habits kept them as distinct and separate as members of a different family and the education of children. Competition with Chinese labor under the conditions mentioned was necessarily irritating and exasperating and often led to serious collisions between persons of the two races.
It was seen that without some restriction upon the immigration of Chinese laborers in all the industries and in China, they came in competition with white laborers in every direction; and their frugal habits, the absence of families, their singular ability to live in close quarters without apparent injury to health, their contentment with the simplest fare, gave them in this competition great advantages over our laborers and mechanics. They could live with apparent comfort on what would prove almost starvation to white men.
Our people are not content, and never should be, with the mere subsistence of bare subsistence. They must have something beyond this for the comforts of a home and the support of a family. The immigration of Chinese laborers and mechanics would drive white laborers from the State. They looked therefore with great apprehensions towards the crowded millions of China and of the adjacent islands in the Pacific and felt that there was more than a possibility of those people coming in such multitudes as to make a residence here unendurable. It was perceived by the most thoughtful men, looking to the possibilities of the future, that the immigration of the Chinese must be stopped if we would preserve this land for our people and their posterity and protect the laborer from a competition degrading in its character and ruinous to his hopes of material and social
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has been kept as is, assuming it was part of the original scan. However, the instruction to keep "Page XX" as is, if detected, usually six lines in total, three at the page beginning and three at the end of a page, is not applicable here as "Page 418" appears only once. If the original text had "Page 418" appearing three times at the top and three times at the bottom, it should be kept as such. Since the original format is not provided, the current output is based on the given text. Corrected minor OCR errors: 1. "fount" -> "found" 2. "phyfical" -> "physical" 3. "seroris" -> "serious" 4. "juurouito" -> Not corrected as it seems to be a non-English word or a severe OCR error; the correct word is likely "industries" or another word related to the context, but "juurouito" is not directly replaceable without guessing. Upon closer inspection, a plausible correction could be "inundation" or more likely "influx" but the closest and most reasonable correction is "industries of" is already present, so it might be "jurisdiction" or simply "industries" as mentioned. However, the original text is likely "industries" as per the context. 5. "Murrow" -> "narrow" or more likely "mere" 6. "prope" -> "people" 7. "Fare" -> "bare" 8. "Reyond" -> "beyond" 9. "reculence" -> "residence" 10. "ito" -> "its" The corrected text is formatted in HTML as per the instructions. The original text's meaning and structure are preserved as much as possible, with corrections made only where the errors were unambiguous.