_The most serious menace to the future peace of this country arises not so
much from the possibility of a sudden invasion in time of war by some
foreign nation, as from the danger of racial conflict resulting from the
slow, steadily increasing invasion of an Asiatic people in time of peace.
Year after year they are coming in thousands to make their homes within the
territory of the United States._
No one who has watched the steady increase of Japanese population in Hawaii
and in our Pacific Coast States can fail to realize this danger. It is a
danger that is already threatening us. It exists to-day, and will continue
to exist every day in the future. It cannot be pushed aside. We cannot
remove it by ignoring it.
Some unexpected incident may at any time start excitement and cause an
explosion that would precipitate a national conflict. In such an event
either Japan or the United States might be forced into war by an
irresistible upheaval of public sentiment. We had that experience in the
case of the blowing up of the Maine. We must not ignore the possibility
that some such moving cause for war might again occur, and start a flame
against which the governments and the Peace Advocates of both nations would
be powerless.
It is unfortunate that the people of the United States generally have no
appreciation of these facts, and give no thought to safeguarding against
them. Their consideration should be approached with the most perfect
friendliness and good feeling, nationally and individually, so far as the
Japanese are concerned. Instead of antagonizing the Japanese, we should
cultivate their good will. There is no nation on the earth--no other race
of people--who more richly _deserve and merit the good will of other
nations_.
Those of the Japanese who come among us should be conceded to have come
with the most pacific intentions. They come from an overcrowded country to
one that is sparsely inhabited--a country that is to them a Land of
Promise--a Land flowing with milk and honey--another Garden of Eden. All
the majority of them want is so much of it as they can cultivate with their
own labor. To their minds that means both comfort and a competence. They
are poor and they long to be rich. Do they differ from us in that?
They come to the Pacific Coast for the same reasons that the early settlers
went into the great West and endured so many hardships to get homes on the
land. They are impelled by the same desire to find the Golden Fleece that
started the migration of the Pioneers of Forty-Nine. But the Japanese are
coming to dig the gold out of gardens and orchards and vineyards, instead
of from the placer mines.
The average American who has much land on the Pacific Coast wants a tenant.
The average Japanese wants only a hoe with which to till the land. Give him
the land and the hoe and he will do the rest. He does not want to hire
somebody to do the work for him or to find somebody who will pay him for
the privilege of doing it.
The Caucasian cultivators of the soil, where there are such, cannot stand
against the competition of either the Chinese or the Japanese. The danger
of racial controversy results from this economic competition. It is a
struggle for the survival of the fittest. The Japanese is the strongest in
that struggle. The Caucasian must succumb or fall back on his government
for protection. In the case of the Chinese this controversy bred bitter
strife. In the case of the Japanese it is liable at any moment to cause
serious international controversy.
That danger will continue until we put a population on every acre of the
rich and fertile land on the Pacific Coast. On every such acre there must
be an occupant who will till the land himself--not a mere owner looking for
a tenant.
The Japanese know the value of water as well as the value of land. Every
cultivated acre in Japan is an irrigated acre. If we are to safeguard
against the menace of conflict with Japan we must not only ourselves
populate and cultivate the land that the Japanese covet, but we must
conserve and use the water as well. We must do with the country what the
Japanese people would do with it if it were theirs. So long as it remains,
from their point of view, unoccupied and unused, they will covet it, and in
the end they will possess it, unless we use and possess it ourselves in
advance of them.
Look at California!
In the great central valley of that State, including the foothill country,
there are 12,500,000 acres of the richest land in the world. The water with
which to irrigate every unirrigated acre of it runs to waste year after
year. Every acre of it could be irrigated. Every acre of it would support a
family. It is so sparsely settled that to the Japanese mind it is vacant
and unoccupied. The greater part of it is to-day unreclaimed. Some of it is
producing grain or hay. The rest is pasture--grazing ground for herds of
live stock where there should be gardens intensively cultivated and homes
forming closely settled communities.
In Japan, on 12,500,000 acres, the same area as in California and no
better land, they have evolved a population of expert gardeners and their
families of 30,000,000 rural people. There is not land enough in Japan to
give back a comfortable living as the reward for their labor. The great
mass of the farming people--really they are not farmers--they are
gardeners--are very poor. California holds out to them a chance for every
family to become rich from their point of view. Should we wonder that they
come to California?
The constant pressure of the population in Japan to overflow will make a
corresponding inflowing pressure upon California. It is like the pressure
of air upon a vacuum. The way to relieve the pressure is to fill the
vacuum. California is the vacuum. Fill it with people of the Caucasian race
who will till the soil they own with their own hands, and the pressure upon
this California vacuum from Asiatic peoples will cease.
If California's garden lands were as densely populated as Belgium was
before the war, there would be no Japanese danger-zone, provided the
California cultivators of the soil tilled their own acres, or acre, as the
Japanese do in their own country and want to do in California.
It would be necessary, in order to settle the Sacramento and San Joaquin
Valleys of California in that way, to use for the irrigation of the San
Joaquin Valley, all the flood water now wasted in the Sacramento Valley.
That can be done. There is no question about it whatever. The first
recommendation to do it was made by a Commission of eminent engineers
appointed by General Grant, when President, to report on the irrigation of
the San Joaquin Valley.
It would require large and comprehensive planning, and the cooperation of
the State and the nation. But had not the nation better spend millions to
populate the country the Japanese covet, than to spend millions to fight a
war with them to keep them out of it. Is it not better to settle the
country, and in that way settle the controversy, than to run the risk of
losing all the precious lives and treasure that a war would cost, and the
risk of having California devastated by that war in the same way that
Belgium has been destroyed?
Ought not that awful possibility to be enough to awaken the people of the
United States to the necessity of doing something, and doing it quick, _to
populate the Pacific Coast_?
If anyone doubts that the Japanese are gaining a firm foothold in our
territory, and a foothold that is steadily growing stronger year by year,
they will be convinced by the mere statement of the facts as to the
Japanese influx into the United States.
The facts relating to that influx and the menace it holds for this country
in the event of a war with Japan, are dispassionately set forth in "The
Valor of Ignorance," by Homer Lea, published in 1909. The author was a
Californian, but had lived many years in the Orient. He had studied it
deeply and thoroughly understood his subject.
In his book he calls attention to the fact that the Japanese population in
Hawaii increased from 116 in 1884 to 22,329 in 1896; and from 22,329 in
1896 to 61,115 in 1909.
Then he gives us these facts:
"Japanese immigration into the Hawaiian Islands, from
1900 to 1908, has been 65,708. The departures during
this period were 42,313. The military unfit have in
this manner been supplanted by the veterans of a great
war, and the military occupation of Hawaii tentatively
accomplished.
"In these islands at the present time the number of
Japanese who have completed their active term of
service in the Imperial armies, a part of whom are
veterans of the Russian War, exceeds the entire field
army of the United States."
Of more startling importance are the facts with reference to Japanese
immigration to the mainland territory of the United States, which are given
in the same volume as follows:
Immigration by political periods:
1891-1900 24,806
1901-1905 64,102
1905-1906 14,243
1906-1907 30,226
------
Total 133,377
During the last six years there have come to the United
States (Report of Bureau of Immigration) 90,123
Japanese male adults.
In California the Japanese constitute more than
one-seventh of the male adults of military age:
Caucasian males of military age 262,694
Japanese males of military age 45,725
In Washington the Japanese constitute nearly one-ninth
of the male population of military age:
Caucasian males of military age 163,682
Japanese males of military age 17,000
The foregoing rapidly increasing tide of Asiatic immigration forced
attention to the subject, and in 1908 the Japanese government agreed
voluntarily with the United States that in future passports should not be
issued by the Japanese government to laborers desiring to emigrate from
Japan to the United States. This temporarily checked this class of
immigration and in the year ending June 30, 1908, the total immigration
fell to 16,418; the year ending June 30, 1909, to 3,275; the year ending
June 30, 1910, to 2,798.
But note the steady increase since then! Year ending June 30, 1911, 4,575;
year ending June 30, 1912, 6,172; year ending June 30, 1913, 8,302; year
ending June 30, 1914, 8,941.
These figures, however, give no adequate conception of the actual facts, as
they have developed in California during the last ten years in such a way
as to stimulate racial controversy. Some of the most beautiful and
productive sections of the fruit-growing regions of California have been
entirely absorbed by Japanese. Caucasian communities have become Japanese
communities. Such a transformation is certainly not one that is calculated
to allay racial controversy.
The alien land law of California will not allay racial controversy--it will
intensify it. Japan has protested against it, as she protested against our
acquisition of Hawaii, and there has been no withdrawal of her protests.
The Japanese government has shown a disposition to mitigate the danger of
controversy by limiting the emigration of Japanese to this country, but
that government can not control her people after they come to this country.
If they cannot buy land they will lease it. That leads to all the trouble
indicated in the following newspaper item:
"Tacoma, Wash., Jan. 5 (1915).--The Tacoma delegation
to the legislature, which will meet on January 11, has
been notified that a bill will be introduced for a
State referendum on a law to prevent leasing of
Washington land to Asiatics. Many members of the
legislature are pledged to support the measure.
"Japanese gardeners, it is contended, are increasing in
numbers, getting the best land about the cities under
lease, and some of them lease land for 99 years or have
a trustee buy it for them. Many Japanese marry 'picture
brides' and later have their leases of titles
transferred to their infant sons and daughters born
here.
"An amendment submitted in November permitting aliens
to own land in cities was overwhelmingly defeated."
There is very little doubt that the majority of the Japanese on the Pacific
Coast are soldiers, veterans of the Japanese wars, and that in case of war
Japan could mobilize on our territory between the Pacific Ocean and the
inaccessible mountains constituting the Cascade and Sierra Nevada Ranges,
more Japanese soldiers who are right now in that territory than we have
United States troops in the whole mainland territory of the United States,
or will have when our army is enlisted up to its full strength of 100,000
men.
The figures given in "The Valor of Ignorance" show that in 1907 there were
62,725 Japanese of military age in the States of Washington and California.
Since then, up to June 30, 1914, the Japanese immigration has been 50,481,
and nearly all of those who come are men of military age. So that now we
have no doubt more trained Japanese soldiers in California, Oregon and
Washington, than our entire standing army if it were enlisted to its full
quota of 100,000 men, including every soldier we have, wherever he may be
stationed.
And at the rate they are now coming, in ten years we will have more than
our entire standing army would then be if we increased it to 200,000, as
the Militarists urge should be done.
_What are we going to do about it?_
That is the question that stares every citizen of the United States
straight in the face.
It may be that all cannot be brought to agree as to what ought to be done,
but certainly all must agree that something should be done, and it is
equally certain that neither an Exclusion Law, nor an Alien Land Law, nor
an Alien Leasing Law, will settle the question, or relieve the strain of
racial competition that is certain, unless obviated, to eventually breed an
armed conflict with Japan.
The same author who has been previously quoted, referring to the Philippine
Islands, says:
"The conquest of these islands by Japan will be less of
a military undertaking than was the seizure of Cuba by
the United States; for while Santiago de Cuba did not
fall until nearly three months after the declaration of
war, Manila will be forced to surrender in less than
three weeks. Otherwise the occupation of Cuba portrays
with reasonable exactitude the manner in which the
Philippines will be taken over by Japan."
Since this was written the events of the present war have still further
strengthened the Japanese power in the Pacific. First China, then Russia,
and now Germany have been eliminated. To complacently assume that Japan
will never have occasion to cross swords with the United States, is surely
a most mistaken attitude for the people of this country to delude
themselves with. It is contrary to every dictate of common sense and
reason, when the people of the Pacific Coast are forced for their own
protection to enact legislation which Japan interprets as a violation of
her treaty rights. The average run of people in other States give no
thought to the matter. They say, "Yes, California has her problem with the
Japs." It is not California's problem. It is the problem of the United
States.
And in calling attention to the practical impossibility of defending the
Pacific Coast against Japanese invasion and occupation in the event of war,
the author heretofore quoted from calls attention to the following facts,
among others, showing our unpreparedness and the complete inadequacy of our
defenses:
"The short period of time within which Japan is able to
transport her armies to this continent--200,000 men in
four weeks, a half million in four months, and more
than a million in ten months--necessitates in this
Republic a corresponding degree of preparedness and
rapidity of mobilization.
"Within one month after the declaration of war this
Republic must place, in each of the three defensive
spheres of the Pacific Coast, armies that are capable
of giving battle to the maximum number of troops that
Japan can transport in a single voyage. This is known
to be in excess of 200,000 men.... We have called
attention to the brevity of modern wars in general and
naval movements in particular; how within a few weeks
after war is declared, concurrent with the seizure of
the Philippines, Hawaii, and Alaska, will the conquest
of Washington and Oregon be consummated. In the same
manner within three months after hostilities have been
begun there, armies will land upon the seaboard of
Southern California.... No force can be placed on the
seaboard of Southern California either within three
months or nine months that would delay the advance of
the Japanese armies a single day.
"The maximum force that can be mobilized in the
Republic immediately following a declaration of war is
less than 100,000 men, of whom two-thirds are militia.
This force, made up of more than forty miniature
armies, is scattered, each under separate military and
civil jurisdiction, over the entire nation. By the time
these heterogeneous elements are gathered together,
organized into proper military units, and made ready
for transportation to the front, the States of
Washington and Oregon will have been invaded and their
conquest made complete by a vastly superior force....
So long as the existent military system continues in
the Republic there can be no adequate defense of any
single portion of the Pacific Coast within a year after
a declaration of war, nor the three spheres within as
many years."
Apparently neither the Militarists, nor the Passivists, nor the
Pacificists, nor the Pacificators, ever give any thought or heed to the
fact of danger from within as the result of a steadily growing alien
population, permanently settled in the United States, and which would in
the event of war constitute a force larger than any army we would have
available for defense.
The chief danger of an armed conflict with Japan arises from the existence
in our midst of this alien population, and the danger that the pressure of
their competition may breed strife similar to that which preceded the
Chinese Exclusion Act, a situation which can never be applied to Japan
without creating a certainty of war immediately or in the future.
In this respect we are like a people living on the slopes below the crater
of a volcano. We can never know when an eruption may take place or what its
extent or consequences may be. All we do know is that the danger exists;
and it is folly beyond the possibility of expression or description to
ignore that fact, and perpetuate our national indifference and
unpreparedness. It is this situation on the Pacific Coast, more than any
other one thing, which makes the advocacy of disarmament for this nation so
inconceivably dangerous unless Japan and China should also disarm, which we
may rest assured they will never do. China is just entering upon a new era
of militarism under a Military Dictator whose policy will be for arms and
armament.
If the disarmament of the United States were to be agreed to and carried
out because other nations agreed to disarm, and Japan and China were
willing to disarm, then the disarmament of Asiatic nations would have to
be coupled with the further safeguard of an agreement stopping emigration
from Asia to America--not only to North America, but to South America as
well. It is not proposed by any of the advocates of disarmament to stop
such immigration, nor will it be stopped. The fact that it will continue
indefinitely through the years of the future is a fact which must be
recognized as fundamental in dealing with the question of national defense
for the United States of America.
The economic conditions created by the Asiatic in America are more
dangerous and difficult of adjustment than any problem resulting from the
military or naval strength of any Asiatic nation so long as their people in
times of peace will stay in Asia. But they will not stay in Asia of their
own accord, and they will not be forced to do so. We must face not only the
problems that will arise from a large Asiatic population on the Pacific
Coast of the United States, but in South America, Central America, and
Mexico.
In a few generations the Japanese will control the northern Pacific shores
of South America. Peru will come to be in reality a Japanese country. The
Japanese will control because they will be in a majority, just as they now
constitute a majority of the population of Hawaii. They will dominate the
Indian population and will absorb or supplant the Spanish just as we have
done in California. In the course of time the Japanese will control Mexico
in the same way, unless we control it ourselves.
It does not follow that we could not live at peace with the Japanese, if
they controlled South America and Mexico, as we now live at peace with them
when they only control Japan, Formosa, Sakhalin, Korea, and their sphere of
influence in Manchuria, as well as Tsing Tau and their Pacific Islands.
But if we are to do so, it can only be done by meeting their economic
competition and establishing within our own territory a system of physical
and mental development, a social and economic system, and a system of
military defense, that will not only be equal but superior to theirs.
The conflict between the races of Asia and the races of America is the
age-old competition to test which is the stronger race. The fittest will
survive. We cannot defend ourselves by temporary exclusion, as we have
tried to do with the Chinese. It is only a question of time when China will
emerge from the slumber of the centuries and provide herself with all the
implements of modern warfare necessary to insist upon the same treatment
for her people that we accord to other nations.
It may be a long time before an armed conflict between the United States
and Japan is precipitated, but it is inevitable, unless the national policy
advocated in this book is adopted. War between this country and Japan
within the next forty years, unless the present trend is checked, is as
inevitable as it has been at all times during the last forty years between
France and Germany, with this difference:
The present European war is the result of primary causes that were so
deeply rooted in wrong and injustice, that no human power could eradicate
them. It is different with Japan. We have no long standing or deeply rooted
controversy with Japan and we need never have if we meet the economic
problem involved in this great racial competition between Asia and America.
It is coming upon us, however, with the slow moving certainty of a glacier,
and meet it we must. We must prevail or be overwhelmed, and unless we can
face the economic conflicts involved and triumph in them, it is useless for
us to undertake to hold our ground by militarism alone.
The fact undoubtedly is that of all three of the plans now before the
people of the United States for national defense or for preserving peace,
the most dangerous and deceptive is that of the militarists, for a bigger
standing army and a bigger navy. It would create a false and misleading
feeling of security from danger which would becloud the real problems
involved and make their solution more difficult, if not impossible.
Japan to-day has the most efficient military system of any nation of the
world. This statement refers to the _system_. Other nations may have larger
armies, but Japan's military system, like that of Switzerland, is fitted
into and matches with her whole social, commercial, and economic system. It
is a part of the very fiber of her national being, and not an excrescence,
as is our standing army.
And behind this she has the most adaptable, industrious, and physically and
mentally efficient and vigorous people of the world. The danger of war
between the United States and Japan is not so much a present as a future
danger. Whether it is in the near future or the far future depends largely
on accident.
The danger could be removed entirely if the American people would
substitute intelligent study of the problem for bumptious conceit, and
concerted action on right lines for aimless talk. Unless we do that our
ultimate fate is as inevitable as that of Rome when she vainly strove by
militarism alone to protect a decadent nation against the onslaughts of
virile races. Our fate will not be so long delayed because we are now
crowding into a decade the events that once evolved slowly through a
century. We may reach in forty years a condition of relative weakness as
against opposing forces which Rome reached only after four hundred years.
There will never be a war between Japan and the United States if the people
of this country will do unto the Japanese in all things as we would desire
the Japanese to do unto us, if our situations were reversed, and they
occupied this country and we theirs, _provided always_, that we at the same
time recognize that the Japanese are the stronger rather than the weaker
race, and cannot be exploited or their labor permanently appropriated for
our profit rather than theirs; and _provided further_, that we recognize
that Japan is enormously overpopulated; that her population, which has
grown from only four or five million in the tenth century to over fifty
million in the twentieth, is increasing at the rate of over 1,000,000 a
year, and that _the hive must swarm_.
This necessity sets forces in motion that are as irresistible in their
workings as the laws that control the universe and direct the stars in
their courses. Whenever race meets race in such a fundamental struggle for
existence, the law of the survival of the fittest is inexorable. As Japan
increases her population, she becomes stronger, because wherever her people
go they root themselves to the soil. As we increase our population, we
become weaker, because we steadily enlarge the proportion of our population
that we crowd into congested cities where it _rots_.
The poison of an Industrial System resting upon a system of life that
destroys Humanity is filtering into the Japanese body politic, but before
it seriously degenerates their racial strength the Japanese will see its
evil effects on the State, and remove the cause.
We see its evil effects on the State, but seem unable to shake off the grip
of Commercialism which is responsible for it. We will never shake off that
grip until we can rise to the higher level of patriotism which will
subordinate Commerce and Industry to the welfare of Humanity.
Unless we are willing to accept, as the inevitable end of our civilization,
the fate of all the Ancient Civilizations, we must remember that no nation
can endure in which one class is exploited for the benefit of another. The
same rule applies inexorably to any attempt by the people of one country to
exploit the people of another and live on their labor.
If an armed conflict should be precipitated in the near future between this
country and Japan it will grow out of racial controversies resulting from
an effort to exploit the Japanese in the United States in the same way that
we are exploiting the immigrants from European countries. The difficulty
that now faces the people of the United States with reference to the
Japanese problem arises from the fact that we can neither exploit, nor
exclude, nor assimilate the Japanese, nor can we, under present conditions,
survive their economic competition within our own territory.
Let the question of exploitation be first considered. There is a strong
contingent of Americans on the Pacific Coast who openly advocate Japanese
immigration. They argue that our proud and superior race will not
condescend to do the "_squat labor_," as they term it, that is necessary to
get the gold from the gardens of California--and from her vast plantations
of potatoes, vegetables, and other food products that are grown on the
marvelously fertile soil of that State. So they want the Japanese to come
and do the "squat labor" while the Aristocratic Anglo-Saxon reaps the
lion's share of the profits as the owner of the land.
_They tried that once with the Chinese, with what result?_
That the docile and subservient Chinese were the best field laborers that
were ever found by any body of plantation-owners, and for a time the
Caucasian owners of the orchards and vineyards and lordly demesnes of
California prospered mightily from the profits earned for them by the labor
of the lowly Chinese.
_But what happened?_
The Chinese were not only faithful and industrious, they were frugal as
well. They saved their money. Soon they were not only laborers, but also
capitalists, in a small way. Then they began to buy land and work in their
own fields, gardens, and orchards. The industries that produced food from
land as the result of intensive cultivation with human labor were rapidly
passing into the hands of the Chinese. They were rapidly buying the lands
which were the basis of those industries. They were ceasing to work for the
benefit of another race. They worked for themselves and their own benefit.
And that was not all. One after another every manufacturing industry in
California in which human labor was a large element of production was being
absorbed by the Chinese. First they worked for American Manufacturers. Then
they became their own employers and the American Manufacturer was forced
out of business by the economic competition of a stronger race. In the end,
it came to be seen of all men that the Caucasian Manufacturer, the
Caucasian Wageworker, and the Caucasian Landowner, and food producer, were
gradually surrendering to and being eliminated by the economic competition
of the Chinese.
So we excluded the Chinese.
If we had not done so, in less than a generation the Pacific Coast would
have been a Chinese Country, and no oppression or mistreatment to which
they could have been subjected would have prevented it, if they had been
allowed to continue the process of commercial and agricultural absorption
that had progressed so far before we finally excluded them.
Now the Japanese are repeating the same process of absorption. We cannot
exclude them, and if we undertook to do so, it would only be postponing the
evil day, when such a policy would breed an armed conflict. The Japanese
regard the law that prohibits their acquisition of land as a violation of
our treaty with them. They look to our own Courts to finally decide it to
be unconstitutional. It may be a long time coming, but the final result of
the law preventing them from acquiring land in California will be war with
Japan _unless other measures are adopted to supplement one that will
ultimately prove so futile_.
The exclusion of the Japanese from the right to acquire land, but still
permitting them to lease land, makes the situation more dangerous than it
was before. It adds to all the dangers of the purely economic struggle
which resulted from Chinese Competition, the additional danger of all the
bad blood that a tenantry system inevitably develops. Every lease-hold will
develop into a breeding place for friction and conflict between individual
landlords and tenants, as well as conflicts between them as opposing
classes, and will result finally in the same racial controversies that led
up to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Already the Japanese tenantry in the Delta of the San Joaquin River have
formed a protective association to enable them to oppose the organized
power of the mass against any objectionable conditions imposed by their
landlords, as well as to fix the rental they are willing to pay. Does
anyone doubt that such a tenantry system will in time breed as much
controversy as the Nonresident Landlord System has caused in Ireland?
The Japanese Tenantry System in California must in the very nature of
things be a Nonresident Landlord System. It can be nothing else. The
community will be Japanese. The landlord will seek a home elsewhere, in a
Caucasian community. His only thought will be to get all he can from those
whose labor produces his income. Their only thought will be to make that
amount as small as possible. We have created another "Irrepressible
Conflict." Whether we will adjust it without a resort to arms is a very
grave question.
One of the most dangerous elements in this complicated problem is the
self-complacent ignorance and refusal to face facts which characterizes the
attitude of the people not only of the western half, but more particularly
those of the eastern half of the United States. Not long ago a paroxysm of
protest resulted from a rumor that a few hundred Japanese were about to
settle in Michigan. But not the slightest heed is paid to the fact that a
sister State has this problem already within her body politic eating like
a cancer at her very vitals; that she is powerless to effectively settle
the question by herself alone; and that no national disposition exists to
settle it in the only way it can possibly be settled. The way to settle it
is not by building more battleships, or enlarging our standing army, or in
any way increasing our naval or military burdens, or doing anything that
will now or hereafter tend to put the neck of the American people under the
heel of militarism. There can be no settlement of this question other than
the one urged in this book. The question is economic, and the settlement
must be economic.
Japan wants no war with us now. Of that we may rest assured. But any such
treatment of the Japanese as we extended to the Chinese would bring war
instantly. Whether the racial animosity that Japanese competition within
our own territory will inevitably create can be controlled, and conflict
caused by it averted, may well be doubted, unless the people of the entire
United States will recognize the problem as vital and national, and
forthwith apply the only possible practicable solution.
We must recognize both the necessity and the right of Japanese expansion
into new territories. That expansion means the upbuilding of enormous
populations of Japanese in those countries. If ten millions of the most
vigorous of Japan's teeming population could be transplanted from their
native country to garden homes in other countries bordering the Pacific,
where their allegiance to Japan would be unaffected, and colonies developed
that would bear the same relation to the mother country that Canada bears
to Great Britain, it would vastly benefit those who remained in Japan as
well as those who emigrated. There must be such an emigration. It cannot be
prevented. The United States should not oppose it.
But where shall they go?
_To the Philippines?_
There you project a controversy even by discussion. Of course Japan will
not colonize the Philippines while we control them. Aside from that, the
climate is undesirable. The Japanese want to colonize where they can
reproduce their racial strength. The climate of the Philippines would
destroy it. Generations will elapse before the Japanese will covet the
Philippines in order to colonize them, though she might want them for other
reasons.
_Shall they go to Manchuria?_
Yes, to some extent, but the great body of the overflowing population of
Japan will not go to Manchuria.
It is a bleak, cold, dreary, and inhospitable country, already to a large
extent cultivated and populated.
The Japanese will not go to Manchuria for another reason.
They are an Island people and the smell of the sea is in their nostrils.
They already control the commerce of the Pacific and their ambition is to
increase that commerce by every means in their power.
The colonies they will found in the future, the countries that the swarming
millions from Japan will covet and occupy will border the Pacific Ocean,
where the ships that fly the Japanese flag will come and go as the couriers
of a great commerce binding the colonies of Japan to the mother country.
Where then will they go?
_To South America?_
Yes, to its northern shores bordering the Pacific, to Colombia, Ecuador,
and Peru, more particularly to Peru. In a very few years, as history runs,
there will be an immense Japanese population on these Northern Pacific
shores of South America. It is not at all unlikely that in less than a
century there will be a larger population in South America of the Japanese
race than now exists in all of Japan. It will be recruited not only from
the surplus population of the mother country, but from a rapid reproduction
of the Japanese among the transplanted population. There will be no race
suicide among the Japanese. They will stick to the land in these new
countries and breed a race as sturdy as its progenitors. They will never
adopt the Anglo-Saxon system of City Congestion and consequent Racial
Extinction.
_Will they go to Mexico?_
Yes, they will go to Mexico, and the Pacific Coast region of Mexico will
be another breeding ground for this hardy and virile race, where likewise
they will be tillers of the soil and a people hardened and strengthened by
constant contact with Mother Earth.
More than that, the Mexicans will speedily be taught, if they require the
lesson, that if they harm a hair in the head of a Japanese, punishment and
retribution will be sure, swift, and severe. They will live at peace with
the Japanese for that reason. It is the only way to have peace in Mexico,
and Japan is strong enough to enforce peace and the security of the lives
and property of all her people that way.
And because they will do that, they will eventually control and dominate
Mexico, in a good deal the same way that England dominates India. Whenever
they do that, they will protect not only their own people and their
property, but that of all other peoples as well, and everybody will be as
safe in Mexico as in Japan. But the waters that now run to waste in the
Pacific Ocean, on the west coast of Mexico, will be harnessed to irrigate
the orchards and gardens of the Japanese and an Asiatic and not a Caucasian
race will possess Mexico.
"_Why?_" some one asks.
For the very simple reason that the Japanese will occupy Mexico because
they want to reclaim and cultivate its waste lands, and not speculate in
them or exploit somebody else who will cultivate them.
Already the Japanese are as laborers cultivating large areas owned by
American Capitalists in the delta of the Colorado River. That will not
last. The Japanese will before very long organize associations among
themselves and acquire and own the land or some other land which they can
own and cultivate for themselves. There is no alien land law in Mexico that
will prevent that and there will be none. The Japanese will see to that.
Neither will there ever be any long continued peace or security for life or
property in Mexico until either Japan or the United States enforces it. If
we do not, they will. _That is as certain as fate._
And when they undertake the task, dragged into it by some outrage on their
own people, shall we stay their hand, and say to them that the Monroe
Doctrine applies to Asiatic as well as to European nations?
It is only a matter of time when we will have to face that question with
Japan. Japan will no more permit the Mexicans to commit outrages on the
Japanese than she will permit us to do it. Some idea of the conflicts that
race hatred may breed in Mexico will be gained by reading the quotation
that follows from "In Mexico the Land of Unrest," by Henry Baerlin.
In the preface of that book we find this description of a "gentle and
joyous passage at arms" of the Mexicans with the Chinese.
"I fancy that a number of the miscreants who, owing to
a mere misunderstanding, massacred three hundred
Chinamen in Torreon not long since--some were cut into
small pieces, some beheaded, some were tied to horses
by their queues and dragged along the streets, while
others had their arms or legs attached to different
horses and were torn asunder, some were stood up naked
in the market gardens of the neighborhood and given
over as so many targets to the drunken marksmen,
thirteen Chinese employees of Yu Hop's General Store
were haled into the street and killed with knives, two
hundred Chinamen were sheltered in the city gaol, but
all their money was appropriated and such articles of
clothing as the warders fancied. One brave girl had
nine of them concealed, and calmly she denied their
presence even when her father had gone out to argue
with the mob and had been shot for being on the Chinese
side--a number of these miscreants, I fancy, are on
other days delightful citizens."[1]
[Footnote 1: "The Mexicans are descended, on the one side," says Mr.
Cunningham Graham, "from the most bloodthirsty race of Indians that the
Spanish Conquerors came across, and on the other side from the very
fiercest elements of the Spanish race itself--elements which had just
emerged from eight hundred years of warfare with the Moors."]
Think you that the Japanese would submit to that without war? The account
of this racial outrage may be overdrawn, but judging from what happened in
our own country when the Chinese were being persecuted prior to the
Exclusion Act, there is nothing inherently improbable in this account. It
is no worse than the Turkish outrages that have often been committed on
Christians in Asia Minor or in Europe.
China has submitted to all such outrages because for centuries she has been
a nation of peace, but the time is not far distant when she will do so no
longer.
With the United States, a nation with a government, in case of race
conflict, leading to insult or injury to Japanese, we could make amends, or
fight, as we chose, and we would probably make amends.
In Mexico, likely at any time to be without a government, as she is now, a
conflict with Japan would be very apt to result like the recent differences
between the Turks and the English in Egypt. The Land of the Montezumas
would become a Protectorate of the Land of Nippon and a part of its Empire
Power.
The Japanese problem would then be transferred from across the Pacific to
across the Rio Grande, and Japanese cotton mills at Guaymas would get their
cotton from the cotton fields of the Colorado River Valley. They would
transport it by water down the Colorado River and across the Gulf of
California and develop a great ocean commerce from the territory that is
tributary to the Gulf of California. That includes the whole valley of the
Colorado River if its transportation facilities were adequately and
comprehensively developed, as the Japanese would develop it, by lines of
Japanese steamers running up the Colorado River at least as far as Yuma.
The American Railroads could not strangle Japanese competition.