CHAPTER XI

THE INNER DIKES

We come now to the frontiers of the white world--to its true frontiers,

marked, not by boundary-stones, but by flesh and blood. These frontiers

are not continuous: far from the European homeland, some run in remote

quarters of the earth, sundered by vast stretches of ocean and connected

only by the slate-gray thread of sea-power--the master-talisman which the

white man still grasps firmly in his hand.

But against these race-frontiers--these "inner dikes"--the rising tide of

color has for decades been beating, and will beat yet more fiercely as

congesting population, quickened self-consciousness, and heightened sense

of power impel the colored world to expansion and dominion. Above the

eastern horizon the dark storm-clouds lower, and the weakened, distracted

white world must soon face a colored peril threatening its integrity and

perhaps its existence. This colored peril has three facets: the peril of

arms, the peril of markets, and the peril of migration. All three contain

ominous potentialities, both singly and in combination. Let us review them

in turn, to appraise their dynamic possibilities.

First, the peril of arms. The military potencies of the colored races have

been the subject of earnest, and frequently alarmist, speculation for the

past twenty years, particularly since the Russo-Japanese War. The

exciting effects of Pan-Islamism upon the warlike peoples of Asia and

Africa have been frequently discussed, while the "Yellow Peril" has long

been a journalistic commonplace.

How shall we appraise the colored peril of arms? On the whole, it would

appear as though the colored military danger, in its isolated, purely

aggressive aspect, had been exaggerated. Visions of a united Asia, rising

suddenly in fanatic frenzy and hurling brown and yellow myriads upon the

white West _seem_ to be the products of superheated imaginations. I say

"seem," because there are unquestionably mysterious emotional depths in

the Asiatic soul which may yet justify the prophets of cataclysmic war. As

Hyndman says: "With all the facts before us, and with prejudice thrown

aside, we are still unable to lay bare the causes of the gigantic Asian

movements of the past. They were certainly not all economic in their

origin, unless we stretch the boundaries of theory so far as to include

the massacre of whole populations and the destruction of their wealth

within the limits of the invaders' desire for material gain. And, whether

these movements arose from material or emotional causes, they have been

before, and they may occur again. Forecast here is impossible. A new

Mohammed is quite as likely to make his appearance as a new Buddha, a

reborn Confucius, or a modern Christ.... Asia raided and scourged Europe

for more than a thousand years. Now, for five hundred years, the

counter-attack of Europe upon Asia has been steadily going on, and it may

be that the land of long memories will cherish some desire to avenge this

period of wrong and rapine in turn. The seed of hatred has already been

but too well sown."[137]

Of course, on this particular point, forecast is, indeed, impossible.

Nevertheless, the point should be noted, for Asiatic war-fever may appear,

if not in isolation, then in conjunction with other stimuli to warlike

action, like population-pressure or imperialistic ambition, which to-day

exist and whose amplitude can be approximately gauged. We have already

analyzed the military potencies of Pan-Islamism and Japan, and China also

should not be forgotten. Pacifist though China has long been, she has had

her bellicose moments in the past and may have them in the future. Should

this occur, China, as the world's greatest reservoir of intelligent

man-power, would be immensely formidable. Pearson visualizes a China

"become an aggressive military power, sending out her armies in millions

to cross the Himalayas and traverse the Steppes, or occupying the islands

and the northern parts of Australia, by pouring in immigrants protected by

fleets. Luther's old name for the Turks, that they were 'the people of the

wrath of God,' may receive a new and terrible application."[138]

Granted that the Chinese will never become the fighting equals of the

world's warrior races, their incredible numbers combined with their

tenacious vitality might overcome opponents individually their superiors.

Says Professor Ross: "To the West the toughness of the Chinese physique

may have a sinister military significance. Nobody fears lest in a stand-up

fight Chinese troops could whip an equal number of well-conditioned white

troops. But few battles are fought by men fresh from tent and mess. In the

course of a prolonged campaign involving irregular provisioning, bad

drinking-water, lying out, loss of sleep, exhausting marches, exposure,

excitement, and anxiety, it may be that the white soldiers would be worn

down worse than the yellow soldiers. In that case the hardier men with

less of the martial spirit might in the closing grapple beat the better

fighters with the less endurance."[139]

The potentialities of the Chinese soldier would acquire vastly greater

significance if China should be thoroughly subjugated by, or solidly

leagued to, ambitious and militaristic Japan. The combined military

energies of the Far East, welded into an aggressive unity, would be a

weapon of tremendous striking-power.

The colored peril of arms may thus be summarized: The brown and yellow

races possess great military potentialities. These (barring the action of

certain ill-understood emotional stimuli) are unlikely to flame out in

spontaneous fanaticism; but, on the other hand, they are very likely to

be mobilized for political reasons like revolt against white dominion or

for social reasons like over-population. The black race offers no real

danger except as the tool of Pan-Islamism. As for the red men of the

Americas, they are of merely local significance.

We are now ready to examine the economic facet of the colored peril: the

industrial-mercantile phase. In the second part of this volume I showed

the profound effect of the "industrial revolution" in furthering white

world-supremacy, and I pointed out the tremendous advantages accruing to

the white world from exploitation of undeveloped colored lands and from

exports of manufactured goods to colored markets. The prodigious wealth

thereby amassed has been a prime cause of white prosperity, has buttressed

the maintenance of white world-hegemony, and has made possible much of the

prodigious increase of white population.

We little realize what the loss of these advantages would mean. As a

matter of fact, it would mean throughout the white world diminished

prosperity, lessened political and military strength, and such relative

economic and social stagnation as would depress national vigor and check

population. It is even possible to visualize a white world reverting to

the condition of Europe in the fifteenth century--thrown back upon itself,

on the defensive, and with a static rather than a progressive

civilization. Such conditions could of course occur only as the result of

colored military and industrial triumphs of the most sweeping character.

But the possibility exists, nevertheless, as I shall endeavor to show.

Down to the close of the nineteenth century white supremacy was as

absolute in industry as it was in politics and war. Even the civilized

brown and yellow peoples were negligible from the industrial point of

view. Asia was economically on an agricultural basis. Such industries as

she possessed were still in the "house-industry" stage, and her products,

while often exquisite in quality, were produced by such slow, antiquated

methods that their quantity was limited and their market-price relatively

high. Despite very low wages, Asiatic products not only could not compete

in the world-market with European and American machine-made, mass-produced

articles, but were hard hit in their home-markets as well. The way in

which an ancient Asiatic handicraft like the Indian textiles was literally

annihilated by the destructive competition of Lancashire cottons is only

one of many similar instances.

With the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Asia began to show

signs of an economic activity as striking in its way as the activity which

Asia was displaying in idealistic and political fields. Japan had already

laid the foundations of her flourishing industrial life based on the most

up-to-date Western models, while in other Asiatic lands, notably in China

and India, the whir of machinery and the smoke of tall factory chimneys

proclaimed that the East was fathoming the industrial secrets of the

West.

What Asiatics were seeking in their industrial revival was well expressed

a decade ago by a Hindu, who wrote in a leading Indian periodical: "In one

respect the Orient is really menacing the West, and so earnest and

open-minded is Asia that no pretense or apology whatever is made about it.

The Easterner has thrown down the industrial gantlet, and from now on Asia

is destined to witness a progressively intense trade warfare, the

Occidental scrambling to retain his hold on the markets of the East, and

the Oriental endeavoring to beat him in a battle in which heretofore he

has been an easy victor.... In competing with the Occidental

commercialists, the Oriental has awakened to a dynamic realization of the

futility of pitting unimproved machinery and methods against modern

methods and appliances. Casting aside his former sense of

self-complacency, he is studying the sciences and arts that have given the

West its material prosperity. He is putting the results of his

investigations to practical use, as a rule, recasting the Occidental

methods and tools to suit his peculiar needs, and in some instances

improving upon them."[140]

The accuracy of this Hindu statement of Asia's industrial awakening is

indorsed by the statements of white observers. At the very moment when the

above article was penned, an American economic writer, Clarence Poe, was

making a study tour of the Orient, from which he brought back the

following report: "The real cause of Asia's poverty lies in just two

things: the failure of Asiatic governments to educate their people, and

the failure of the people to increase their productive capacity by the use

of machinery. Ignorance and lack of machinery are responsible for Asia's

poverty; knowledge and modern tools are responsible for America's

prosperity." But, continues Mr. Poe, we must watch out. Asia now realizes

these things and is doing much to remedy the situation. Hence, "we must

face in ever-increasing degree the rivalry of awakening peoples who are

strong with the strength that comes from struggle with poverty and

hardship, and who have set themselves to master and apply all our secrets

in the coming world-struggle for industrial supremacy and for racial

readjustment."[141] And more recently another American observer of Asiatic

economic conditions reports: "All Asia is being permeated with modern

industry and present-day mechanical progress."[142]

Take, for example, the momentous possibilities involved in the industrial

awakening of China. China is not merely the most populous of lands,

containing as it does nearly one-fourth of all the human beings on earth,

but it is also dowered with immense natural resources, notably coal and

iron--the prime requisites of modern industrial life. Hitherto China has

been on an agricultural basis, with virtually no exploitation of her

mineral wealth and with no industry in the modern sense. But the day when

any considerable fraction of China's laborious millions turn from the

plough and handicrafts to the factory must see a portentous reaction in

the most distant markets.

Thirty years ago, Professor Pearson forecast China's imminent industrial

transformation. "Does any one doubt," he asks, "that the day is at hand

when China will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap transport by

railways and steamers, and will have founded technical schools to develop

her industries? Whenever that day comes, she may wrest the control of the

world's markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and

Germany."[143]

Much of what Professor Pearson prophesied has already come to pass, for

China to-day has the beginnings of a promising industrial life. Even a

decade ago Professor Ross wrote of industrial conditions there:

"Assuredly the cheapness of Chinese labor is something to make a factory

owner's mouth water. The women reelers in the silk filatures of Shanghai

get from eight to eleven cents for eleven hours of work. But Shanghai is

dear; and, besides, everybody there complains that the laborers are

knowing and spoiled. In the steel works at Hanyang common labor gets three

dollars a month, just a tenth of what raw Slavs command in the South

Chicago iron-works. Skilled mechanics get from eight to twelve dollars. In

a coal-mine near Ichang a thousand miles up the Yangtse the coolie

receives one cent for carrying a 400-pound load of coal on his back down

to the river a mile and a half away. He averages ten loads a day but must

rest every other week. The miners get seven cents a day and found; that

is, a cent's worth of rice and meal. They work eleven hours a day up to

their knees in water, and all have swollen legs. After a week of it they

have to lie off a couple of days. No wonder the cost of this coal

(semi-bituminous) at the pit's mouth is only thirty-five cents a ton. At

Chengtu servants get a dollar and a half a month and find themselves.

Across Szechuan lusty coolies were glad to carry our chairs half a day for

four cents each. In Sianfu the common coolie gets three cents a day and

feeds himself, or eighty cents a month. Through Shansi roving harvesters

were earning from four to twelve cents a day, and farm-hands got five or

six dollars a year and their keep. Speaking broadly, in any part of the

empire, willing laborers of fair intelligence may be had in any number at

from eight to fifteen cents a day.

"With an ocean of such labor power to draw on, China would appear to be on

the eve of a manufacturing development that will act like a continental

upheaval in changing the trade map of the world. The impression is

deepened by the tale of industries that have already sprung up."[144]

Of course there is another side to the story. Low wages alone do not

insure cheap production. As Professor Ross remarks: "For all his native

capacity, the coolie will need a long course of schooling, industrial

training, and factory atmosphere before he inches up abreast of the German

or American working man."[145] In the technical and directing staffs there

is the same absence of the modern industrial spirit, resulting in chronic

mismanagement, while Chinese industry is further handicapped by

traditional evils like "squeeze," nepotism, lust for quick profits, and

incapacity for sustained business team-play. These failings are not

peculiar to China; they hamper the industrial development of other Asiatic

countries, notably India. Still, the way in which Japanese industry, with

all its faults, is perfecting both its technic and its methods shows that

these failings will be gradually overcome and indicates that within a

generation Asiatic industry will probably be sufficiently advanced to

supply at least the Asiatic home-markets with most of the staple

manufactures.

Thus it looks as though white manufactures will tend to be progressively

eliminated from Asiatic markets, even under conditions of absolutely free

competition. But it is a very moot point whether competition will remain

free--whether, on the contrary, white wares will not be increasingly

penalized. The Asiatic takes a keen interest in his industrial development

and consciously favors it even where whites are in political control. The

"swadeshi" movement in India is a good example, while the Chinese and

Egyptian boycotts of foreign as against native goods are further

instances in point. The Japanese have supplemented these spontaneous

popular movements by systematic governmental discrimination in favor of

Japanese products and the elimination of white competition from Japan and

its dependencies. This Japanese policy has been markedly successful, and

should Japan's present hegemony over China be perpetuated the white man

may soon find himself economically as well as politically expelled from

the whole Far East.

A decade ago Putnam Weale wrote warningly: "If China is forced, owing to

the short-sighted diplomacy of those for whom the question has really

supreme importance, to make common cause with Japan as a _pis aller_, then

it may be accepted as inevitable that in the course of time there will be

created a _mare clausum_, which will extend from the island of Saghalien

down to Cochin-China and Siam, including all the island-groups, and the

shores of which will be openly hostile to the white man....

"And since there will be no danger from the competition of white workmen,

but rather from the white man's ships, the white man's merchants, his

inventions, his produce--it will be these which will be subjected to

humiliating conditions.... It is not a very far cry from tariffs on goods

to tariffs and restrictions on foreign shipping, on foreign merchants, on

everything foreign--restrictions which by imposing vast and unequal

burdens on the activities of aliens will soon totally destroy such

activities.... What can very easily happen is that the federation of

eastern Asia and the yellow races will be finally arranged in such a

manner as to exclude the white man and his commerce more completely than

any one yet dreams of."[146]

This latter misfortune may be averted by concerted white action, but it is

difficult to see how the gradual elimination of white goods from Asiatic

markets as the result of successful Asiatic competition can be averted.

Certainly the stubborn maintenance of white political domination over a

rebellious Asia would be no remedy. That would merely intensify swadeshi

boycotts in the subject regions, while in the lands freed from white

political control it would further Japan's policy of excluding everything

white. If Asiatics resolve to buy their own products instead of ours we

may as well reconcile ourselves to the loss. Here again frank recognition

of the inevitable will enable us to take a much stronger and more

justifiable position on the larger world-aspects of the problem.

For Asia's industrial transformation is destined to cause momentous

reactions in other parts of the globe. If Asiatic industry really does get

on an efficient basis, its potentialities are so tremendous that it must

presently not only monopolize the home-markets but also seek to invade

white markets as well, thus presenting the white world with commercial and

economic problems as unwelcome as they will be novel.

Again, industrialization will in some respects aggravate Asiatic longings

for migration and dominion. In my opening pages I mentioned

industrialization as a probable reliever of population-pressure in Asiatic

countries by affording new livelihoods to the congested masses. This is

true. But, looking a trifle farther, we can also see that

industrialization would stimulate a further prodigious increase of

population. Consider the growth of Europe's population during the

nineteenth century under the stimulus of the industrial revolution, making

possible the existence in our industrialized Europe of three times as many

people as existed in the agricultural Europe of a hundred years ago. Why

should not a similar development occur in Asia? To-day Asia, though still

upon a basis as agricultural as eighteenth-century Europe, contains fully

900,000,000 people. That even a partially industrialized Asia might

support twice that number would (judging by the European precedent) be far

from improbable.

But this would mean vastly increased incentives to expansion--commercial,

political, racial--beyond the bounds of Asia. It would mean intensified

encroachments, not only upon areas of white settlement, but perhaps even

more upon non-Asiatic colored regions of white political control like

Africa and tropical America. Here again we see why the white man, however

conciliatory in Asia, must stand like flint in Africa and Latin America.

To allow the whole tropic belt clear round the world to pass into Asiatic

hands would practically spell white race-suicide.

Professor Pearson paints a truly terrible picture of the stagnation and

hopelessness which would ensue. "Let us conceive," he writes, "the leading

European nations to be stationary, while the black and yellow belt,

including China, Malaysia, India, central Africa, and tropical America, is

all teeming with life, developed by industrial enterprise, fairly well

administered by native governments, and owning the better part of the

carrying trade of the world. Can any one suppose that, in such a condition

of political society, the habitual temper of mind in Europe would not be

profoundly changed? Depression, hopelessness, a disregard of invention and

improvement, would replace the sanguine confidence of races that at

present are always panting for new worlds to conquer. Here and there, it

may be, the more adventurous would profit by the traditions of old

supremacy to get their services accepted in the new nations, but as a rule

there would be no outlet for energy, no future for statesmanship. The

despondency of the English people, when their dream of conquest in France

was dissipated, was attended with a complete decay of thought, with civil

war, and with a standing still, or perhaps a decline of population, and to

a less degree of wealth.... It is conceivable that our later world may

find itself deprived of all that is valued on earth, of the pageantry of

subject provinces and the reality of commerce, while it has neither a

disinterred literature to amuse it nor a vitalized religion to give it

spiritual strength."[147]

To sum up: The economic phase of the colored peril, though not yet a

major factor, must still be seriously reckoned with by forward-looking

statesmanship as something which will increasingly complicate the

relations of the white and non-white worlds. In fact, even to-day it tends

to intensify Asiatic desires for expansion, and thus exacerbates the

third, or migratory, phase of the colored peril, which is already upon us.

The question of Asiatic immigration is incomparably the greatest external

problem which faces the white world. Supreme phase of the colored peril,

it already presses, and is destined to press harder in the near future. It

infinitely transcends the peril of arms or markets, since it threatens not

merely our supremacy or prosperity but our very race-existence, the

wellsprings of being, the sacred heritage of our children.

That this is no overstatement of the issue, a bare recital of a few

biological axioms will show. We have already seen that nothing is more

_unstable_ than the racial make-up of a people, while, conversely, nothing

is more _unchanging_ than the racial divisions of mankind. We have seen

that true amalgamation is possible only between members of the same

race-stock, while in crossings between stocks even as relatively near

together as the main divisions of the white species, the race-characters

do not really fuse but remain distinct in the mixed offspring and tend

constantly to resort themselves as pure types by Mendelian inheritance.

Thus a country inhabited by a mixed population is really inhabited by

different races, one of which always tends to dominate and breed the

other out--the outbred strains being lost to the world forever.

Now, since the various human stocks differ widely in genetic worth,

nothing should be more carefully studied than the relative values of the

different strains in a population, and nothing should be more rigidly

scrutinized than new strains seeking to add themselves to a population,

because such new strains may hold simply incalculable potentialities for

good or for evil. The potential reproductive powers of any stock are

almost unlimited. Therefore the introduction of even a small group of

prolific and adaptable but racially undesirable aliens may result in their

subsequent prodigious multiplication, thereby either replacing better

native stocks or degrading these by the injection of inferior blood.

The admission of aliens should, indeed, be regarded just as solemnly as

the begetting of children, for the racial effect is essentially the same.

There is no more damning indictment of our lopsided, materialistic

civilization than the way in which, throughout the nineteenth century,

immigration was almost universally regarded, not from the racial, but from

the material point of view, the immigrant being viewed not as a creator of

race-values but as a mere vocal tool for the production of material

wealth.

Immigration is thus, from the racial standpoint, a form of procreation,

and like the more immediate form of procreation it may be either the

greatest blessing or the greatest curse. Human history is largely the

story of migrations, making now for good and now for ill. Migration

peopled Europe with superior white stocks displacing ape-like aborigines,

and settled North America with Nordics instead of nomad redskins. But

migration also bastardized the Roman world with Levantine mongrels,

drowned the West Indies under a black tide, and is filling our own land

with the sweepings of the European east and south.

Migration, like other natural movements, is of itself a blind force. It is

man's divine privilege as well as duty, having been vouchsafed knowledge

of the laws of life, to direct these blind forces, rejecting the bad and

selecting the good for the evolution of higher and nobler destinies.

Colored immigration is merely the most extreme phase of a phenomenon which

has already moulded prodigiously the development of the white world. In

fact, before discussing the specific problems of colored immigration, it

would be well to survey the effects of the immigration of various white

stocks. When we have grasped the momentous changes wrought by the

introduction of even relatively near-related and hence relatively

assimilable strains, we will be better able to realize the far more

momentous consequences which the introduction of colored stocks into white

lands would entail.

The racial effects of immigration are ably summarized by that lifelong

student of immigration problems, Prescott F. Hall. These effects are, he

truly remarks, "more far-reaching and potent than all others. The

government, the state, society, industry, the political party, social and

political ideals, all are concepts and conventions created by individual

men; and when individuals change these change with them. Recent

discoveries in biology show that in the long run heredity is far more

important than environment or education; for though the latter can

develop, it cannot create. They also show what can be done in a few years

in altering species, and in producing new ones with qualities hitherto

unknown, or unknown in combination."[148]

The ways in which admixture of alien blood can modify or even destroy the

very soul of a people have been fully analyzed both by biologists and by

social psychologists like Doctor Gustave Le Bon.[149] The way in which

wholesale immigration, even though mainly white, has already profoundly

modified American national character is succinctly stated by Mr. Eliot

Norton. "If," he writes, "one considers the American people from, say,

1775 to 1860, it is clear that a well-defined national character was in

process of formation. What variations there were, were all of the same

type, and these variations would have slowly grown less and less marked.

It needs little study to see of what great value to any body of men,

women, and children a national or racial type is. It furnishes a standard

of conduct by which any one can set his course. The world is a difficult

place in which to live, and to establish moral standards has been one of

the chief occupations of mankind. Without such standards, man feels as a

mariner without a compass. Religions, rules, laws, and customs are only

the national character in the form of standards of conduct. Now national

character can be formed only in a population which is stable. The repeated

introduction into a body of men of other men of different type or types

cannot but tend to prevent its formation. Thus the 19,000,000 of

immigrants that have landed have tended to break up the type which was

forming, and to make the formation of any other type difficult. Every

million more will only intensify this result, and the absence of a

national character is a loss to every man, woman, and child. It will show

itself in our religions, rules of conduct, in our laws, in our

customs."[150]

The vital necessity of restriction and selection in immigration to

conserve and build race-values is thus set forth by Mr. Hall:

"There is one aspect of immigration restriction in the various countries

which does not often receive much attention; namely, the possibility of

its use as a method of world-eugenics. Most persons think of migration in

terms of space--as the moving of a certain number of people from one part

of the earth's surface to another. Whereas the much more important aspect

of it is that of a functioning in time.

"This comes from two facts. The first is that the vacuum left in any

country by emigration is rapidly filled up through a rise in the

birth-rate.... The second fact is that immigration to any country of a

given stratum of population tends to sterilize all strata of higher social

and economic levels already in that country. So true is this that nearly

all students of the matter are agreed that the United States would have a

larger population to-day if there had been no immigration since 1820, and,

it is needless to add, a much more homogeneous population. As long as the

people of any community are relatively homogeneous, what differences of

wealth and social position there may be do not affect the birth-rate, or

do so only after a considerable time. But put into that community a number

of immigrants, inferior mentally, socially, and economically, and the

natives are unwilling to have their children associate with them in work

or social life. They then limit the number of their children in order to

give them the capital or education to enter occupations in which they will

not be brought into contact with the new arrivals. This result is quite

apparent in New England, where successive waves of immigration from lower

and lower levels have been coming in for eighty years. In the West, the

same New England stock has a much higher birth-rate, showing that its

fertility is in no way diminished. In the South, where until very recently

there was no immigration at all, and the only socially inferior race was

clearly separated by the accident of color, the birth-rate has remained

very high, and the very large families of the colonial period are even now

not uncommon.

"This is not to say that other causes do not contribute to lower the

birth-rate of a country, for that is an almost world-wide phenomenon. But

the desire to be separated from inferiors is as strong a motive to

birth-control as the desire for luxury or to ape one's economic superiors.

Races follow Gresham's law as to money: the poorer of two kinds in the

same place tends to supplant the better. Mark you, _supplant_, not drive

out. One of the most common fallacies is the idea that the natives whose

places are taken by the lower immigrants are 'driven up' to more

responsible positions. A few may be pushed up; more are driven to a new

locality, as happened in the mining regions; _but most are prevented from

coming into existence at all_.

"What is the result, then, of the migration of 1,000,000 persons of lower

level into a country where the average is of a higher level? Considering

the world as a whole, there are, after a few years, 2,000,000 persons of

the lower type in the world, and probably from 500,000 to 1,000,000 less

of the higher type. The proportion of lower to higher in the country from

which the migration goes may remain the same; but in the country receiving

it, it has _risen_. Is the world as a whole the gainer?

"Of course the euthenist[151] says at once that these immigrants are

improved. We may grant that, although the improvement is probably much

exaggerated. You cannot make bad stock into good by changing its meridian,

any more than you can turn a cart-horse into a hunter by putting it into a

fine stable, or make a mongrel into a fine dog by teaching it tricks. But

such improvement as there is involves time, expense, and trouble; and,

when it is done, has anything been gained? Will any one say that the races

that have supplanted the old Nordic stock in New England are any better,

or as good, as the descendants of that stock would have been if their

birth-rate had not been lowered?

"Further, in addition to the purely biological aspects of the matter,

there are certain psychological ones. Although a cosmopolitan atmosphere

furnishes a certain freedom in which strong congenital talents can

develop, it is a question whether as many are not injured as helped by

this. Indeed, there is considerable evidence to show that for the

production of great men, a certain homogeneity of environment is

necessary. The reason of this is very simple. In a homogeneous community,

opinions on a large number of matters are fixed. The individual does not

have to attend to such things, but is free to go ahead on some special

line of his own, to concentrate to his limit on his work, even though that

work be fighting the common opinions.

"But in a community of many races, there is either cross-breeding or there

is not. If there is, the children of such cross-breeding are liable to

inherit two souls, two temperaments, two sets of opinions, with the

result in many cases that they are unable to think or act strongly and

consistently in any direction. The classic examples are Cuba, Mexico, and

Brazil. On the other hand, if there is no cross-breeding, the diversity

exists in the original races, and in a community full of diverse ideals of

all kinds much of the energy of the higher type of man is dissipated in

two ways. First, in the intellectual field there is much more doubt about

everything, and he tends to weigh, discuss, and agitate many more

subjects, in order to arrive at a conclusion amid the opposing views.

Second, in practical affairs, much time and strength have to be devoted to

keeping things going along old lines, which could have been spent in new

research and development. In how many of our large cities to-day are men

of the highest type spending their whole time fighting, often in vain, to

maintain standards of honesty, decency, and order, and in trying to

compose the various ethnic elements, who should be free to build new

structures upon the old!

"The moral seems to be this: Eugenics among individuals is encouraging the

propagation of the fit, and limiting or preventing the multiplication of

the unfit. World-eugenics is doing precisely the same thing as to races

considered as wholes. Immigration restriction is a species of segregation

on a large scale, by which inferior stocks can be prevented from both

diluting and supplanting good stocks. Just as we isolate bacterial

invasions, and starve out the bacteria by limiting the area and amount of

their food-supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its

native habitat, where its own multiplication in a limited area will, as

with all organisms, eventually limit its numbers and therefore its

influence. On the other hand, the superior races, more self-limiting than

the others, with the benefits of more space and nourishment will tend to

still higher levels.

"This result is not merely a selfish benefit to the higher races, but a

good to the world as a whole. The object is to produce the greatest number

of those fittest not 'for survival' merely, but fittest for all purposes.

The lower types among men progress, so far as their racial inheritance

allows them to, chiefly by imitation and emulation. The presence of the

highest development and the highest institutions among any race is a

distinct benefit to all the others. It is a gift of _psychological

environment_ to any one capable of appreciation."[152]

The impossibility of any advanced and prosperous community maintaining its

social standards and handing them down to its posterity in these days of

cheap and rapid transportation except by restrictions upon immigrations is

thus explained by Professor Ross: "Now that cheap travel stirs the social

deeps and far-beckoning opportunity fills the steerage, immigration

becomes ever more serious to the people that hopes to rid itself at least

of slums, 'masses,' and 'submerged.' What is the good of practising

prudence in the family if hungry strangers may crowd in and occupy at the

banquet table of life the places reserved for its children? Shall it, in

order to relieve the teeming lands of their unemployed, abide in the pit

of wolfish competition and renounce the fair prospect of growth in

suavity, comfort, and refinement? If not, then the low-pressure society

must not only slam its doors upon the indraft, but must double-lock them

with forts and iron-clads, lest they be burst open by assault from some

quarter where 'cannon food' is cheap."[153]

These admirable summaries of the immigration problem in its world-aspect

are strikingly illustrated by our own country, which may be considered as

the leading, if not the "horrible," example. Probably few persons fully

appreciate what magnificent racial treasures America possessed at the

beginning of the nineteenth century. The colonial stock was perhaps the

finest that nature had evolved since the classic Greeks. It was the very

pick of the Nordics of the British Isles and adjacent regions of the

European continent--picked at a time when those countries were more Nordic

than now, since the industrial revolution had not yet begun and the

consequent resurgence of the Mediterranean and Alpine elements had not

taken place.

The immigrants of colonial times were largely exiles for conscience's

sake, while the very process of migration was so difficult and hazardous

that only persons of courage, initiative, and strong will-power would

voluntarily face the long voyage overseas to a life of struggle in an

untamed wilderness haunted by ferocious savages.

Thus the entire process of colonial settlement was one continuous, drastic

cycle of eugenic selection. Only the racially fit ordinarily came, while

the few unfit who did come were mostly weeded out by the exacting

requirements of early American life.

The eugenic results were magnificent. As Madison Grant well says: "Nature

had vouchsafed to the Americans of a century ago the greatest opportunity

in recorded history to produce in the isolation of a continent a powerful

and racially homogeneous people, and had provided for the experiment a

pure race of one of the most gifted and vigorous stocks on earth, a stock

free from the diseases, physical and moral, which have again and again

sapped the vigor of the older lands. Our grandfathers threw away this

opportunity in the blissful ignorance of national childhood and

inexperience."[154] The number of great names which America produced at

the beginning of its national life shows the high level of ability

possessed by this relatively small people (only about 3,000,000 whites in

1790). With our hundred-odd millions we have no such output of genius

to-day.

The opening decades of the nineteenth century seemed to portend for

America the most glorious of futures. For nearly seventy years after the

Revolution, immigration was small, and during that long period of ethnic

isolation the colonial stock, unperturbed by alien influences, adjusted

its cultural differences and began to display the traits of a genuine new

type, harmonious in basic homogeneity and incalculably rich in racial

promise. The general level of ability continued high and the output of

talent remained extraordinarily large. Perhaps the best feature of the

nascent "native American" race was its strong idealism. Despite the

materialistic blight which was then creeping over the white world, the

native American displayed characteristics more reminiscent of his

Elizabethan forebears than of the materialistic Hanoverian Englishman. It

was a wonderful time--and it was only the dawn!

But the full day of that wondrous dawning never came. In the late forties

of the nineteenth century the first waves of the modern immigrant tide

began breaking on our shores, and the tide swelled to a veritable deluge

which never slackened till temporarily restrained by the late war. This

immigration, to be sure, first came mainly from northern Europe, was thus

largely composed of kindred stocks, and contributed many valuable

elements. Only during the last thirty years have we been deluged by the

truly alien hordes of the European east and south. But, even at its best,

the immigrant tide could not measure up to the colonial stock _which it

displaced_, not reinforced, while latterly it became a menace to the very

existence of our race, ideals, and institutions. All our slowly acquired

balance--physical, mental, and spiritual--has been upset, and we to-day

flounder in a veritable Serbonian bog, painfully trying to regain the

solid ground on which our grandsires confidently stood.

The dangerous fallacy in that short-sighted idealism which seeks to make

America the haven of refuge for the poor and oppressed of all lands, and

its evil effects not only on America but on the rest of the world as well,

has been convincingly exposed by Professor Ross. He has scant patience

with those social "uplifters" whose sympathy with the visible alien at the

gate is so keen that they have no feeling for the _invisible_ children of

_our_ poor who will find the chances gone, nor for those at the gate of

the to-be, who might have been born, but will not be.

"I am not of those," he writes, "who consider humanity and forget the

nation, who pity the living but not the unborn. To me, those who are to

come after us stretch forth beseeching hands as well as do the masses on

the other side of the globe. Nor do I regard America as something to be

spent quickly and cheerfully for the benefit of pent-up millions in the

backward lands. What if we become crowded without their ceasing to be so?

I regard it (America) as a nation whose future may be of unspeakable value

to the rest of mankind, provided that the easier conditions of life here

be made permanent by high standards of living, institutions, and ideals,

which finally may be appropriated by all men. We could have helped the

Chinese a little by letting their surplus millions swarm in upon us a

generation ago; but we have helped them infinitely more by protecting our

standards and having something worth their copying when the time

came."[155]

The perturbing influence of recent immigration must vex American life for

many decades. Even if laws are passed to-morrow so drastic as to shut out

permanently the influx of undesirable elements, it will yet take several

generations before the combined action of assimilation and elimination

shall have restabilized our population and evolved a new type-norm

approaching in fixity that which was on the point of crystallizing

three-quarters of a century ago.

The biologist Humphrey thus punctures the "melting-pot" delusion: "Our

'melting-pot,'" he writes, "would not give us in a thousand years what

enthusiasts expect of it--a _fusing_ of all our various racial elements

into a new type which shall be the true American. It _will_ give us for

many generations a perplexing diversity in ancestry, and since our

successors must reach back into their ancestry for characteristics, this

diversity will increase the uncertainty of their inheritances. They will

inherit no stable blended character, because there is no such thing. They

will inherit from a mixture of unlike characteristics contributed by

unlike peoples, and in their inheritance they will have certain of these

characteristics in full identity, while certain others they will not have

at all."[156]

Thus, under even the most favorable circumstances, we are in for

generations of racial readjustment--an immense travail, essentially

needless, since the final product will probably not measure up to the

colonial standard. We will probably never (unless we adopt positive

eugenic measures) be the race we might have been if America had been

reserved for the descendants of the picked Nordics of colonial times.

But that is no reason for folding our hands in despairing inaction. On the

contrary, we should be up and doing, for though some of our race-heritage

has been lost, more yet remains. We can still be a very great people--if

we will it so. Heaven be praised, the colonial stock was immensely

prolific before the alien tide wrought its sterilizing havoc. Even to-day

nearly one-half of our population is of the old blood, while many millions

of the immigrant stock are sound in quality and assimilable in kind.

Only--the immigrant tide must at all costs be stopped and America given a

chance to stabilize her ethnic being. It is the old story of the sibylline

books. Some, to be sure, are ashes of the dead past; all the more should

we conserve the precious volumes which remain.

One fact should be clearly understood: If America is not true to her own

race-soul, she will inevitably lose it, and the brightest star that has

appeared since Hellas will fall like a meteor from the human sky, its

brilliant radiance fading into the night. "We Americans," says Madison

Grant, "must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our

social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism

that has made America 'an asylum for the oppressed,' are sweeping the

nation toward a racial abyss. If the melting-pot is allowed to boil

without control and we continue to follow our national motto and

deliberately blind ourselves to 'all distinctions of race, creed, or

color,' the type of native American of colonial descent will become as

extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles and the Viking of the days

of Rollo."[157]

And let us not lay any sacrificial unction to our souls. If we cheat our

country and the world of the splendid promise of American life, we shall

have no one to blame but ourselves, and we shall deserve, not pity, but

contempt. As Professor Ross well puts it: "A people that has no more

respect for its ancestors and no more pride of race than this deserves the

extinction that surely awaits it."[158]

This extended discussion of the evil effects of even white immigration

has, in my opinion, been necessary in order to get a proper perspective

for viewing the problem of colored immigration. For it is perfectly

obvious that if the influx of inferior kindred stocks is bad, the influx

of wholly alien stocks is infinitely worse. When we see the damage wrought

in America, for example, by the coming of persons who, after all, belong

mostly to branches of the white race and who nearly all possess the basic

ideals of white civilization, we can grasp the incalculably greater damage

which would be wrought by the coming of persons wholly alien in blood and

possessed of idealistic and cultural backgrounds absolutely different from

ours. If the white immigrant can gravely disorder the national life, it is

not too much to say that the colored immigrant would doom it to certain

death.

This doom would be all the more certain because of the enormous potential

volume of colored immigration. Beside it, the white immigrant tide of the

past century would pale into insignificance. Leaving all other parts of

the colored world out of the present discussion, three Asiatic

countries--China, Japan, and India--together have a population of nearly

800,000,000. That is practically twice the population of Europe--the

source of white immigration. And the vast majority of these 800,000,000

Asiatics are potential immigrants into white territories. Their standards

of living are so inconceivably low, their congestion is so painful, and

their consequent desire for relief so keen that the high-standard,

relatively empty white world seems to them a perfect paradise. Only the

barrier of the white man's veto has prevented a perfect deluge of colored

men into white lands, and even as it is the desperate seekers after fuller

life have crept and crawled through every crevice in that barrier, until

even these advance-guards to-day constitute serious local problems along

the white world's race-frontiers.

The simple truth of the matter is this: A mighty problem--a planet-wide

problem--confronts us to-day and will increasingly confront us in the days

to come. Says Putnam Weale: "A struggle has begun between the white man

and all the other men of the world to decide whether non-white men--that

is, yellow men, or brown men, or black men--may or may not invade the

white man's countries in order there to gain their livelihood. The

standard of living being low in the lands of colored men and high in the

lands of the white man, it has naturally followed that it has been in the

highest degree attractive for men of color during the past few decades to

proceed to regions where their labor is rewarded on a scale far above

their actual requirements--that is, on the white man's scale. This simple

economic truth creates the inevitable contest which has for years filled

all the countries bordering on the Pacific with great dread; and which, in

spite of the temporary truce which the so-called 'Exclusion Policy' has

now enforced, will go much farther than it has yet gone."[159]

The world-wide significance of colored immigration and the momentous

conflicts which it will probably provoke are ably visualized by Professor

Ross.

"The rush of developments," he writes, "makes it certain that the vision

of a globe 'lapped in universal law' is premature. If the seers of the

mid-century who looked for the speedy triumph of free trade had read their

Malthus aright, they might have anticipated the tariff barriers that have

arisen on all hands within the last thirty years. So, to-day one needs no

prophet's mantle to foresee that presently the world will be cut up with

immigration barriers which will never be levelled until the intelligent

accommodation of numbers to resources has greatly equalized

population-pressure all over the globe.... Dams against the color races,

with spillways of course for students, merchants, and travellers, will

presently enclose the white man's world. Within this area minor dams will

protect the high wages of the less prolific peoples against the surplus

labor of the more prolific.

"Assuredly, every small-family nation will try to raise such a dam, and

every big-family nation will try to break it down. The outlook for peace

and disarmament is, therefore, far from bright. One needs but compare the

population-pressures in France, Germany, Russia, and Japan to realize

that, even to-day, the real enemy of the dove of peace is not the eagle of

pride or the vulture of greed, but the stork!

"The great point of doubt in birth restriction is the ability of the

Western nations to retain control of the vast African, Australasian, and

South American areas they have staked out as preserves to be peopled at

their leisure with the diminishing overflow of their population. If

underbreeding should leave them without the military strength that alone

can defend their far-flung frontiers in the southern hemisphere, those

huge underdeveloped regions will assuredly be filled with the children of

the brown and the yellow races."[160]

Thus, white men, of whatever country and however far removed from personal

contact with colored competitors, must realize that the question of

colored immigration vitally concerns every white man, woman, and child;

because nowhere--_absolutely nowhere_--can white labor compete on equal

terms with colored immigrant labor. The grim truth is that there are

enough hard-working colored men to swamp the whole white world.

No palliatives will serve to mitigate the ultimate issue, for if the white

race should to-day surrender enough of its frontiers to ease the existing

colored population-pressure, so quickly would these surrendered regions be

swamped, and so rapidly would the fast-breeding colored races fill the

homeland gaps, that in a very short time the diminished white world would

be faced with an even louder colored clamor for admittance--backed by an

increased power to enforce the colored will.

The profoundly destructive effects of colored competition upon white

standards of labor and living has long been admitted by all candid

students of the problem. So warm a champion of Asiatics as Mr. Hyndman

acknowledges that "the white workers cannot hold their own permanently

against Chinese competition in the labor market. The lower standard of

life, the greater persistence, the superior education of the Chinese will

beat them, and will continue to beat them."[161]

Wherever the white man has been exposed to colored competition,

particularly Asiatic competition, the story is the same. Says the

Australian Professor Pearson: "No one in California or Australia, where

the effects of Chinese competition have been studied, has, I believe, the

smallest doubt that Chinese laborers, if allowed to come in freely, could

starve all the white men in either country out of it, or force them to

submit to harder work and a much lower standard of wages."[162]

And a South African, writing of the effects of Hindu immigration into

Natal, remarks in similar vein: "The condition of South Africa--especially

of Natal--is a warning to other lands to bar Asiatic immigrants.... Both

economically and socially the presence of a large Oriental population is

bad. The Asiatics either force out the white workers, or compel the latter

to live down to the Asiatic level. There must be a marked deterioration

amongst the white working classes, which renders useless a great deal of

the effort made in educational work. The white population is educated and

trained according to the best ideas of the highest form of Western

civilization--and has to compete for a livelihood against Asiatics! In

South Africa this competition is driving out the white working class,

because the average European cannot live down to the Asiatic level--and if

it is essential that the European must do so, for the sake of his own

happiness, do not educate him up to better things. If cheapness is the

only consideration, if low wages are to come before everything else, then

it is not only waste of money, but absolute cruelty, to inspire in the

white working classes tastes and aspirations which it is impossible for

them to realize. To meet Asiatic competition squarely, it would be

necessary to train the white children to be Asiatics. Even the

pro-Orientals would hardly advocate this."[163]

The lines just quoted squarely counter the "survival of the fittest" plea

so often made by Asiatic propagandists for colored immigration. The

argument runs that, since the Oriental laborer is able to underbid the

white laborer, the Oriental is the "fittest" and should therefore be

allowed to supplant the white man in the interests of human progress. This

is of course merely clever use of the well-known fallacy which confuses

the terms "fittest" and "best." The idea that, because a certain human

type "fits" in certain ways a particular environment (often an unhealthy,

man-made social environment), it should be allowed to drive out another

type endowed with much richer potentialities for the highest forms of

human evolution, is a sophistry as absurd as it is dangerous.

Professor Ross puts the matter very aptly when he remarks concerning

Chinese immigration: "The competition of white laborer and yellow is not

so simple a test of human worth as some may imagine. Under good conditions

the white man can best the yellow man in turning off work. But under bad

conditions the yellow man can best the white man, because he can better

endure spoiled food, poor clothing, foul air, noise, heat, dirt,

discomfort, and microbes. Reilly can _outdo_ Ah-San, but Ah-San can

_underlive_ Reilly. Ah-San cannot take away Reilly's job as being a better

workman; but because he can live and do some work at a wage on which

Reilly cannot keep himself fit to work at all, three or four Ah-Sans can

take Reilly's job from him. And they will do it, too, unless they are

barred out of the market where Reilly is selling his labor. Reilly's

endeavor to exclude Ah-San from his labor market is not the case of a man

dreading to pit himself on equal terms against a better man. Indeed, it is

not quite so simple and selfish and narrow-minded as all that. It is a

case of a man fitted to get the most out of good conditions refusing to

yield his place to a weaker man able to withstand bad conditions."[164]

All this is no disparagement of the Asiatic. He is perfectly justified in

trying to win broader opportunities in white lands. But we whites are

equally justified in keeping these opportunities for ourselves and our

children. The hard facts are that there is not enough for both; that when

the enormous outward thrust of colored population-pressure bursts into a

white land _it cannot let live_, but automatically crushes the white man

out--first the white laborer, then the white merchant, lastly the white

aristocrat; until every vestige of white has gone from that land forever.

This inexorable process is thus described by an Australian: "The colored

races become agencies of economic disturbance and social degradation. They

sap and destroy the upward tendencies of the poorer whites. The latter,

instead of always having something better to look at and strive after,

have a lower standard of living, health, and cleanliness set before them,

and the results are disastrous. They sink to the lower level of the

Asiatics, and the degrading tendency proceeds upward by saturation,

affecting several grades of society.... There is an insidious, yet

irresistible, process of social degradation. The colored race does not

intentionally, or even consciously, lower the European; it simply happens

so, by virtue of a natural law which neither race can control. As debased

coinage will drive out good currency, so a lowered standard of living will

inexorably spread until its effects are universally felt."[165]

It all comes down to a question of self-preservation. And, despite what

sentimentalists may say, self-preservation _is_ the first law of nature.

To love one's cultural, idealistic, and racial heritage; to swear to pass

that heritage unimpaired to one's children; to fight, and, if need be, to

die in its defense: all this is eternally right and proper, and no amount

of casuistry or sentimentality can alter that unalterable truth. An

Englishman put the thing in a nutshell when he wrote: "Asiatic immigration

is not a question of sentiment, but of sheer existence. The whole problem

is summed up in Lafcadio Hearn's pregnant phrase: 'The East can

_underlive_ the West.'"[166]

Rigorous exclusion of colored immigrants is thus vitally necessary for the

white peoples. Unfortunately, this exclusion policy will not be easily

maintained. Colored population-pressure is insistent and increasing, while

the matter is still further complicated by the fact that, while no white

_community_ can gain by colored immigration, white

_individuals_--employers of labor--may be great gainers and hence often

tend to put private interest above racial duty. Barring a handful of

sincere but misguided cosmopolitan enthusiasts, it is unscrupulous

business interests which are behind every white proposal to relax the

exclusion laws protecting white areas.

In fairness to these business interests, however, let us realize their

great temptations. To the average employer, especially in the newer areas

of white settlement where white labor is scarce and dictatorial, what

could be more enticing than the vision of a boundless supply of cheap and

eager colored labor?

Consider this Californian appraisement of the Chinese coolie: "The Chinese

coolie is the ideal industrial machine, the perfect human ox. He will

transform less food into more work, with less administrative friction,

than any other creature. Even now, when the scarcity of Chinese labor and

the consequent rise in wages have eliminated the question of cheapness,

the Chinese have still the advantage over all other servile labor in

convenience and efficiency. They are patient, docile, industrious, and

above all 'honest' in the business sense that they keep their contracts.

Also, they cost nothing but money. Any other sort of labor costs human

effort and worry, in addition to the money. But Chinese labor can be

bought like any other commodity, at so much a dozen or a hundred. The

Chinese contractor delivers the agreed number of men, at the agreed time

and place, for the agreed price, and if any one should drop out he finds

another in his place. The men board and lodge themselves, and when the

work is done they disappear from the employer's ken until again needed.

The entire transaction consists in paying the Chinese contractor an agreed

number of dollars for an agreed result. This elimination of the human

element reduces the labor problem to something the employer can

understand. The Chinese labor-machine, from his standpoint, is

perfect."[167]

What is true of the Chinese is true to a somewhat lesser extent of all

"coolie" labor. Hence, once introduced into a white country, it becomes

immensely popular--among employers. How it was working out in South

Africa, before the exclusion acts there, is clearly explained in the

following lines: "The experience of South Africa is that when once Asiatic

labor is admitted, the tendency is for it to grow. One manufacturer

secures it and is able to cut prices to such an extent that the other

manufacturers are forced either to employ Asiatics also or to reduce white

wages to the Asiatic level. Oriental labor is something which does not

stand still. The taste for it grows. A party springs up financially

interested in increasing it. In Natal to-day the suggestion that Indian

labor should no longer be imported is met by an outcry from the planters,

the farmers, and landowners, and a certain number of manufacturers, that

industries and agriculture will be ruined. So the coolie ships continue to

arrive at Durban, and Natal becomes more and more a land of black and

brown people and less a land of white people. Instead of becoming a Canada

or New Zealand, it is becoming a Trinidad or Cuba. Instead of white

settlers, there are brown settlers.... The working-class white population

has to go, as it is going in Natal. The country becomes a country of white

landlords and supervisors controlling a horde of Asiatics. It does not

produce a nation or a free people. It becomes what in the old days of

English colonization was called a 'plantation.'"[168]

All this gives a clearer idea of the difficulties involved in a successful

guarding of the gates. But it also confirms the conviction that the gates

must be strictly guarded. If anything further were needed to reinforce

that conviction it should be the present state of those white outposts

where the gates have been left ajar.

Hawaii is a good example. This mid-Pacific archipelago was brought under

white control by masterful American Nordics, who established Anglo-Saxon

institutions and taught the natives the rudiments of Anglo-Saxon

civilization. The native Hawaiians, like the other Polynesian races, could

not stand the pressure of white civilization, and withered away. But the

white oligarchy which controlled the islands determined to turn their

marvellous fertility to immediate profit. Labor was imported from the ends

of the earth, the sole test being working ability without regard to race

or color. There followed a great influx of Asiatic labor--at first Chinese

until annexation to the United States brought Hawaii under our Chinese

exclusion laws; later on Filipinos, Koreans, and, above all, Japanese.

The results are highly instructive. These Asiatics arrived as agricultural

laborers to work on the plantations. But they did not stay there. Saving

their wages, they pushed vigorously into all the middle walks of life. The

Hawaiian fisherman and the American artisan or shopkeeper were alike

ousted by ruthless undercutting. To-day the American mechanic, the

American storekeeper, the American farmer, even the American contractor,

is a rare bird indeed, while Japanese corporations are buying up the

finest plantations and growing the finest pineapples and sugar. Fully half

the population of the islands is Japanese, while the Americans are being

literally encysted as a small and dwindling aristocracy. In 1917 the

births of the two races were: American, 295; Japanese, 5,000! Comment is

superfluous.

Clear round the globe, the island of Mauritius, the half-way house between

Asia and Africa, tells the same tale. Originally settled by Europeans,

mostly French, Mauritius imported negroes from Africa to work its rich

soil. This at once made impossible the existence of a white laboring

class, though the upper, middle, and artisan classes remained unaffected

by the economically backward blacks. A hundred years ago one-third of the

population were whites. But after the abolition of slavery the negroes

quit work, and Asiatics were imported to take their place. The upshot was

that the whites were presently swamped beneath the Asiatic tide--here

mostly Hindus. To-day the Hindus alone form more than two-thirds of the

whole population, the whites numbering less than one-tenth. Indeed, the

very outward aspect of the island is changing. The old French landmarks

are going, and the fabled land of "Paul and Virginia" is becoming a bit of

Hindustan, with a Chinese fringe. Even Port Louis, the capital town, has

mostly passed from white to Indian or Chinese hands.

Now what do these two world-sundered cases mean? They mean, as an English

writer justly remarks, "that under the British flag Mauritius has become

an outpost of Asia, just as Hawaii is another such and under the Stars and

Stripes."[169] And, of course, there is Natal, already mentioned, which,

at the moment when the recent South African Exclusion Act stayed the

Hindu tide, had not only been partially transformed into an Asiatic land,

but was fast becoming a centre of Asiatic radiation all over South Africa.

With such grim warnings before their eyes, it is not strange that the

lusty young Anglo-Saxon communities bordering the Pacific--Australia, New

Zealand, British Columbia, and our own "coast"--have one and all set their

faces like flint against the Oriental and have emblazoned across their

portals the legend: "All White." Nothing is more striking than the

instinctive and instantaneous solidarity which binds together Australians

and Afrikanders, Californians and Canadians, into a "sacred union" at the

mere whisper of Asiatic immigration.

Everywhere the slogan is the same. "The 'White Australia' idea," cries an

antipodean writer, "is not a political theory. It is a gospel. It counts

for more than religion; for more than flag, because the flag waves over

all kinds of races; for more than the empire, for the empire is mostly

black, or brown or yellow; is largely heathen, largely polygamous, partly

cannibal. In fact, the White Australia doctrine is based on the necessity

for choosing between national existence and national suicide."[170] "White

Australia!" writes another Australian in similar vein. "Australians of all

classes and political affiliations regard the policy much as Americans

regard the Constitution. It is their most articulate article of faith.

The reason is not far to seek.... Australian civilization is little more

than a partial fringe round the continental coastline of 12,210 miles. The

coast and its hinterlands are settled and developed, although not

completely for the entire circumference; in the centre of the country lie

the apparently illimitable wastes of the Never-Never Land, occupied

entirely by scrub, snakes, sand, and blackfellows. The almost manless

regions of the island-continent are a terrible menace. It is impossible to

police at all adequately such an enormous area. And the peoples of Asia,

beating at the bars that confine them, rousing at last from their age-long

slumber, are chafing at the restraints imposed upon their free entry into

and settlement of such uninhabited, undeveloped lands."[171]

So the Australians, 5,000,000 whites in a far-off continent as large as

the United States, defy clamoring Asia and swear to keep Australia a white

man's land. Says Professor Pearson: "We are guarding the last part of the

world in which the higher races can increase and live freely, for the

higher civilization. We are denying the yellow race nothing but what it

can find in the home of its birth, or in countries like the Indian

Archipelago, where the white man can never live except as an exotic."[172]

So Australia has raised drastic immigration barriers conceived on the

lines laid down by Sir Henry Parkes many years ago: "It is our duty to

preserve the type of the British nation, and we ought not for any

consideration whatever to admit any element that would detract from, or in

any appreciable degree lower, that admirable type of nationality. We

should not encourage or admit amongst us any class of persons whatever

whom we are not prepared to advance to all our franchises, to all our

privileges as citizens, and all our social rights, including the right of

marriage. I maintain that no class of persons should be admitted here who

cannot come amongst us, take up all our rights, perform on a ground of

equality all our duties, and share in our august and lofty work of

founding a free nation."[173]

From Canada rises an equally uncompromising determination. Listen to Mr.

Vrooman, a high official of British Columbia: "Our province is becoming

Orientalized, and one of our most important questions is whether it is to

remain a British province or become an Oriental colony--for we have three

races demanding seats in our drawing-room, as well as places at our

board--the Japanese, Chinese, and East Indian."[174] And a well-known

Canadian writer, Miss Laut, thus defines the issue: "If the resident Hindu

had a vote--and as a British subject, why not?--and if he could break down

the immigration exclusion act, he could outvote the native-born Canadian

in ten years. In Canada are 5,500,000 native-born, 2,000,000 aliens. In

India are hundreds of millions breaking the dikes of their own natural

barriers and ready to flood any open land. Take down the barriers on the

Pacific coast, and there would be 10,000,000 Hindus in Canada in ten

years."[175]

Our Pacific coast takes precisely the same attitude. Says Chester H.

Rowell, a California writer: "There is no right way to solve a race

problem except to stop it before it begins.... The Pacific coast is the

frontier of the white man's world, the culmination of the westward

migration which is the white man's whole history. It will remain the

frontier so long as we regard it as such; no longer. Unless it is

maintained there, there is no other line at which it can be maintained

without more effort than American government and American civilization are

able to sustain. The multitudes of Asia are awake, after their long sleep,

as the multitudes of Europe were when our present flood of immigration

began. We know what could happen, on the Asiatic side, by what did happen

and is happening on the European side. On that side we have survived....

But against Asiatic immigration we could not survive. The numbers who

would come would be greater than we could encyst, and the races who would

come are those which we could never absorb. The permanence not merely of

American civilization, but of the white race on this continent, depends on

our not doing on the Pacific side what we have done on the Atlantic

coast."[176]

Says another Californian, Justice Burnett: "The Pacific States comprise an

empire of vast potentialities and capable of supporting a population of

many millions. Those now living there propose that it shall continue to be

a home for them and their children, and that they shall not be overwhelmed

and driven eastward by an ever-increasing yellow and brown flood."[177]

All "economic" arguments are summarily put aside. "They say," writes

another Californian, "that our fruit-orchards, mines, and seed-farms

cannot be worked without them (Oriental laborers). It were better that

they never be developed than that our white laborers be degraded and

driven from the soil. The same arguments were used a century and more ago

to justify the importation of African labor.... As it is now, no

self-respecting white laborer will work beside the Mongolian upon any

terms. The proposition, whether we shall have white or yellow labor on the

Pacific coast, must soon be settled, for we cannot have both. If the

Mongolian is permitted to occupy the land, the white laborer from east of

the Rockies will not come here--he will shun California as he would a

pestilence. And who can blame him?"[178]

The middle as well as the working class is imperilled by any large number

of Orientals, for "The presence of the Japanese trader means that the

white man must either go out of business or abandon his standard of

comfort and sink to the level of the Asiatic, who will sleep under his

counter and subsist upon food that would mean starvation to his white

rival."[179]

Indeed, Californian assertions that Oriental immigration menaces, not

merely the coast, but the whole continent, seem well taken. This view was

officially indorsed by Mr. Caminetti, Commissioner-General of Immigration,

who testified before a Congressional committee some years ago: "Asiatic

immigration is a menace to the whole country, and particularly to the

Pacific coast. The danger is general. No part of the United States is

immune. The Chinese are now spread over the entire country, and the

Japanese want to encroach. The Chinese have become so acclimated that they

can prosper in any part of our country.... I would have a law to register

the Asiatic laborers who come into the country. It is impossible to

protect ourselves from persons who come in surreptitiously."[180]

Fortunately, the majority of thinking Americans are to-day convinced that

Oriental immigration must not be tolerated. Most of our leading men have

so expressed themselves. For example, Woodrow Wilson, during his first

presidential campaign, declared on May 3, 1912: "In the matter of Chinese

and Japanese coolie immigration, I stand for the national policy of

exclusion. The whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We

cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the

Caucasian race. Their lower standard of living as laborers will crowd out

the white agriculturist and is in other fields a most serious industrial

menace. The success of free democratic institutions demands of our people

education, intelligence, and patriotism, and the State should protect them

against unjust and impossible competition. Remunerative labor is the basis

of contentment. Democracy rests on the equality of the citizen. Oriental

coolieism will give us another race-problem to solve and surely we have

had our lesson."[181]

The necessity for rigid Oriental exclusion is nowhere better exemplified

than by the alarm felt to-day in California by the extraordinarily high

birth-rate of its Japanese residents. There are probably not over 150,000

Japanese in the whole United States, their numbers being kept down by the

"Gentlemen's Agreement" entered into by the Japanese and American

Governments. But, few though they are, they bring in their women--and

these women bring many children into the world. The California Japanese

settle in compact agricultural colonies, which so teem with babies that a

leading California organ, the Los Angeles _Times_, thus seriously

discusses the matter:

"There may have been a time when an anti-Japanese land bill would have

limited Japanese immigration. But such a law would be impotent now to keep

native Japanese from possessing themselves of the choicest agricultural

and horticultural land in California. For there are now more than 30,000

children in the State of Japanese parentage, native-born; they possess all

the rights of leasing and ownership held by white children born here....

The birth statistics seem to prove that the danger is not from the

Japanese soldiers, but from the picture brides. The fruitfulness of those

brides is almost uncanny.... Here is a Japanese problem of sufficient

gravity to merit serious consideration. We are threatened with an

over-production of Japanese children. First come the men, then the picture

brides, then the families. If California is to be preserved for the next

generation as a 'white man's country' there must be some movement started

that will restrict the Japanese birth-rate in California. When a condition

is reached in which two children of Japanese parentage are born in some

districts for every white child, it is about time something else was done

than making speeches about it in the American Senate.... If the same

present birth-ratio were maintained for the next ten years, there would be

150,000 children of Japanese descent born in California in 1929 and but

40,000 white children. And in 1949 the majority of the population of

California would be Japanese, ruling the State."[182]

The alarm of our California contemporary may, in this particular instance,

be exaggerated. Nevertheless, when we remember the practically unlimited

expansive possibilities of even small human groups under favorable

conditions, the picture drawn contains no features inherently impossible

of realization. What is absolutely certain is that any wholesale Oriental

influx would inevitably doom the whites, first of the Pacific coast, and

later of the whole United States, to social sterilization and ultimate

racial extinction.

Thus all those newer regions of the white world won by the white expansion

of the last four centuries are alike menaced by the colored migration

peril; whether these regions be under-developed, under-populated frontier

marches like Australia and British Columbia, or older and better-populated

countries like the United States.

And let not Europe, the white brood-land, the heart of the white world,

think itself immune. In the last analysis, the self-same peril menaces it

too. This has long been recognized by far-sighted men. For many years

economists and sociologists have discussed the possibility of Asiatic

immigration into Europe. Low as wages and living standards are in many

European countries, they are yet far higher than in the congested East,

while the rapid progress of social betterment throughout Europe must

further widen the gap and make the white continent seem a more and more

desirable haven for the swarming, black-haired bread-seekers of China,

India, and Japan.

Indeed, a few observers of modern conditions have come to the conclusion

that this invasion of Europe by Asiatic labor is unescapable, and they

have drawn the most pessimistic conclusions. For example, more than a

decade ago an English writer asserted gloomily: "No level-headed thinker

can imagine that it will always be possible to prevent the free migration

of intelligent races, representing in the aggregate half the peoples of

the world, should those peoples actively conceive that their welfare

demands that they should seek employment in Europe. In these days of rapid

transit, of aviation, such a measure of repression is impossible.... We

shall not be destroyed, perhaps, by the sudden onrush of invaders, as Rome

was overwhelmed by the northern hordes; we shall be gradually subdued and

absorbed by the 'peaceful penetration' of more virile races."[183]

Now, mark you! All that I have thus far written concerning colored

immigration has been written without reference to the late war. In other

words, the colored-migration peril would have been just as grave as I have

described it even if the white world were still as strong as in the years

before 1914.

But the war has of course immensely aggravated an already critical

situation. The war has shaken both the material and psychological bases of

white resistance to colored infiltration, while it has correspondingly

strengthened Asiatic hopes and hardened Asiatic determination to break

down the barriers debarring colored men from white lands.

Asia's perception of what the war signified in this respect was

instantaneous. The war was not a month old before Japanese journals were

suggesting a relaxation of Asiatic exclusion laws in the British colonies

as a natural corollary to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and Anglo-Japanese

comradeship in arms. Said the Tokio _Mainichi Deupo_ in August, 1914: "We

are convinced that it is a matter of the utmost importance that Britons

beyond the seas should make a better attempt at fraternizing with Japan,

as better relations between the English-speaking races and Japan will have

a vital bearing on the destiny of the empire. There is no reason why the

British colonies fronting on the Pacific should not actively participate

in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Britain needs population for her surplus

land and Japan needs land for her surplus population. This fact alone

should draw the two races closer together. Moreover, the British people

have ample capital but deficiency of labor, while it is the reverse with

Japan.... The harmonious co-operation of Britain and her colonies with

Japan insures safety to British and Japanese interests alike. Without such

co-operation, Japan and Great Britain are both unsafe."[184]

What this "co-operation" implies was very frankly stated by _The Japan

Magazine_ at about the same date: "There is nothing that would do so much

to bind East and West firmly together as the opening of the British

colonies to Japanese immigration. Then, indeed, Britain would be a lion

endowed with wings. Large numbers of Japanese in the British colonies

would mean that Britain would have the assistance of Japan in the

protection of her colonies. But if an anti-Japanese agitation is

permitted, both countries will be making the worst instead of the best of

the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Thus it would be allowed to make Japan an

enemy instead of a friend. It seems that the British people both at home

and in the colonies are not yet alive to the importance of the policy

suggested, and it is, therefore, pointed out and emphasized before it is

too late."[185]

The covert threat embodied in those last lines was a forerunner of the

storm of anti-white abuse which rose from the more bellicose sections of

the Japanese press as soon as it became evident that neither the British

Dominions nor the United States were going to relax their immigration

laws. Some of this anti-white comment, directed particularly against the

Anglo-Saxon peoples, I have already noted in the second chapter of this

book, but such comment as bears directly on immigration matters I have

reserved for discussion at this point.

For example, the Tokio _Yorodzu_ wrote early in 1916: "Japan has been most

faithful to the requirements of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and yet the

treatment meted out to our countrymen in Canada, Australia, and other

British colonies has been a glaring insult to us."[186] A year later a

writer in _The Japan Magazine_ declared: "The agitation against Japanese

in foreign countries must cease, even if Japan has to take up arms to stop

it. She should not allow her immigration to be treated as a

race-question."[187] And in 1919 the _Yorodzu_ thus paid its respects to

the exclusionist activity of our Pacific coast States: "Whatever may be

their object, their actions are more despicable than those of the Germans

whose barbarities they attacked as worthy of Huns. At least, these

Americans are barbarians who are on a lower plane of civilization than the

Japanese."[188]

The war produced no letting down of immigration barriers along the white

world's exposed frontiers, where men are fully alive to the peril. But the

war did produce temporary waverings of sentiment in the United States,

while in Europe colored labor was imported wholesale in ways which may

have ominous consequences.

Our own acute labor shortage during the war, particularly in agriculture,

led many Americans, especially employers, to cast longing eyes at the

tempting reservoirs of Asia. Typical of this attitude is an article by

Hudson Maxim in the spring of 1918. Mr. Maxim urged the importation of a

million Chinese to solve our farming and domestic-service problems.

"If it is possible," he wrote, "by the employment of Chinese methods of

intensive farming, to increase the production of our lands to such an

extent, how stupendous would be the benefit of wide introduction of such

methods. The exhausted lands of New England could be made to produce like

a tropical garden. The vast areas of the great West that are to-day not

producing 10 per cent of what they ought to produce could be made to

produce the other 90 per cent by the introduction of Chinese labor.... The

average American does not like farming. The sons of the prosperous farmers

do not take kindly to the tilling of the soil with their own hands. They

prefer the excitement and the diversions and stimulus of the life of city

and town, and they leave the farm for the office and factory....

"Chinese, imported as agricultural laborers and household servants, would

solve the agricultural labor problem and the servant problem, and we

should have the best agricultural workers in the world and the best

household servants in the world, in unlimited numbers."[189]

Now I submit that such arguments, however well-intentioned, are nothing

short of race-treason. If there be one truth which history has proved, it

is the solemn truth that those who _work_ the land will ultimately _own_

the land.

Furthermore, the countryside is the seed-bed from which the city

populations are normally recruited. The one bright spot in our otherwise

dubious ethnic future is the fact that most of our unassimilable aliens

have stopped in the towns, while many of the most assimilable immigrants

have settled in the country, thus reinforcing rather than replacing our

native American rural population. Any suggestion which advocates the

settlement of our countryside by Asiatics and the deliberate driving of

our native stocks to the towns, there to be sterilized and eliminated, is

simply unspeakable.

Fortunately, such fatal counsels were with us never acted upon, albeit

they should be remembered as lurking perils which will probably be urged

again in future times of stress. But during Europe's war-agony, yellow,

brown, and black men were imported wholesale, not only for the armies, but

also for the factories and fields. These colored aliens have mostly been

shipped back to their homes. Nevertheless, they have carried with them

vivid recollections of the marvellous West, and the tale will spread to

the remotest corners of the colored world, stirring hard-pressed colored

bread-seekers to distant ventures. Furthermore, Europe has had a practical

demonstration of the colored alien's manifold usefulness, and if Europe's

troubles are prolonged, the colored man may be increasingly employed there

both in peace and war.

Even during the war the French and English working classes felt the

pressure of colored competition. Race-feeling grew strained, and presently

both England and France witnessed the (to them) unwonted spectacles of

race-riots in their port-towns where the colored aliens were most thickly

gathered. An American observer thus describes the "breaking of the

exclusion walls erected against the Chinese":

"In London, one Wednesday evening, twenty-four months ago (_i. e._, in

1916), there was a mass-meeting held on the corner of Piggot Street,

Limehouse, to protest against the influx of John Chinaman into bonny old

England.... The London navvies that night heard a protest against 'the

Chinese invasion' of Britain. They knew that down on the London docks

there were two Chinamen to every white man since the coming of war. They

knew that many of these yellow aliens were married. They knew, too, that a

big Chinese restaurant had just opened down the West India Dock Road.

"The Sailors' and Firemen's Union--one of the most powerful in

England--carried the protest into the Trades-Union Congress held at

Birmingham. There, alarm was voiced at the steady increase in the number

of Chinese hands on Britain's ships. It was an increase, true, since the

stress of war-times had begun to try Britain. But what England's sons of

the seven seas wanted to know was: when is 'this Orientalizing' of the

British marine to stop?... The seamen's unions were willing to do their

bit for John Bull, but they wondered what was going to happen after the

coming of peace. Would the Chinese continue to man John Bull's ships?...

"Such is one manifestation of the decisive lifting of gates and barriers

that has taken place since the white world went to war. To-day the

Chinese--for decades finding a wall in every white man's country--are

numbered by the tens of thousands in the service of the Allies. They have

made good. They are a war-factor.... All told, 200,000 Chinese are

'carrying on' in the war-zone, laboring behind the lines, in

munition-works and factories, manning ships....

"What will happen when peace comes upon this red world--a world turned

topsyturvy by the white man's Great War, which has taken John Chinaman

from Shantung, Chihli, and Kwangtung to that battle-ground in France?...

That makes the drafting of China's man-power one of the most supremely

important events in the Great War. The family of nations is taking on a

new meaning--John Chinaman overseas has a place in it. As Italian

harvest-labor before the war went to and from Argentina for a few months'

work, so the Chinese have gone to Europe under contract and go home again.

Perhaps this action will have a bearing on the solution of the Far West's

agricultural labor problem.

"Do not believe for a moment that the armies of Chinese in Europe will

forget the lessons taught them in the West. When these sons of Han come

home, the Great War will be found to have given birth to a new East."[190]

So ends our survey. It has girdled the globe. And the lesson is always the

same: Colored migration is a _universal_ peril, menacing every part of the

white world. Nowhere can the white man endure colored competition;

everywhere "the East can _underlive_ the West." The grim truth of the

matter is this: The whole white race is exposed, immediately or

ultimately, to the possibility of social sterilization and final

replacement or absorption by the teeming colored races.

What this unspeakable catastrophe would mean for the future of the planet,

and how the peril may be averted, will form the subject of my concluding

pages.