In the year 1890 I wrote in the San Francisco _Examiner_, _àpropos_ of
Chinese immigration:
“There is but one remedy—I do not recommend it: to kill the Chinese.
That we shall not do: the minority will not undertake, nor the majority
permit. It would be massacre now; in its own good time (too late) it
will be war. We could kill the Chinese now, as we have killed the
Indians; but fifty years hence—perhaps thirty—the nation that kills
Chinamen will have to answer to China.”
Twenty-one years later a Chinese warship steamed into the port of Vera
Cruz, Mexico, to back up a demand of the Chinese government for an
indemnity for a massacre of Chinese subjects. She was a little warship,
but she bore a momentous mandate, performed it and steamed away, the
world as inattentive to the event as it had been to the prophecy.
Perhaps our national indifference to the portentous phenomenon came of
“use and wont;” already an American president had been made to grovel
at the feet of a Japanese emperor, and had truculently threatened a
state of the union with war if it did not adjust its municipal laws
to the will of that Asian sovereign. Clearly, as the hope was then
expressed, “we have reached the end of Asiatic dictation”—the hither
end, unfortunately.
All Asia is astir, looking East and West. Its incalculable multitudes
are learning war and navigation; and Caucasian powers—“infatuate,
blind, selfsure!”—are their tutors. Their armies are taught by European
officers, their warships are built in European and American ports. All
the military powers unite in maintaining “the integrity of China” and
in awakening her to aggression and dominance.
Even if it were to our immediate interest to preserve the integrity of
the Chinese Empire a long look ahead might disclose a greater one that
would be best subserved by partition. In a single generation Japan has
performed the astonishing feat of changing civilizations. It has been,
for her, retrogression, for the civilization that she has discarded
was superior to that which she has adopted; but in one important
particular she has been the gainer by the exchange; in the matter,
namely, of military power, and therefore political consequence. As by
a leap, she has advanced from nowhere to the position of a first-rate
power. What she has done China is doing, with this difference: China’s
advance will be to a position that will dominate the world and reduce
the foremost nations of to-day to second place. Trained by European
officers to European methods of warfare, such an army as she can
raise and equip from her four hundred millions of population will be
invincible. It may overrun Europe and extinguish Christian civilization
on that continent, which would not be a very good thing for it on this.
It was only yesterday—a little more than two hundred years ago—that
Europe came within a single battle-hazard of being an Islam dependency.
If John Sobieski had been defeated under the walls of Vienna, that
city, Berlin, Paris and London would to-day be Mohammedan capitals.
History has not exhausted its reserve of astounding events, nor have
civilizations learned the secret of stability.
It is easy to affirm, in the case of China, the impossibility of any
such racial transformation as the one supposed, but fifty years ago
it would have been easy to point out its impossibility in the case
of Japan—if any human being had had the imagination and hardihood to
suggest it. Japan has made the impossible possible, the possible a
thing to be feared. As a measure of precaution, the partition of China
merits the profoundest consideration.
Actual forces at the back of a great movement are seldom apparent to
those engaged in directing it. Statesmanship is mostly a matter of
temporary expedients for accomplishment of small purposes, but if
there is to-day a really great statesman of the Caucasian race he
is considering the partition of China among European nations as an
alternative to the partition of European nations among the Chinese.
Meantime we occupy ourselves with laws and treaties to “exclude”
Chinese and other inevitable Asians from our continent. Successive
relays of American statesmen wreck themselves upon the problem and go
down smiling. To some of us it is given to see that the Asian can not
be excluded—that the course of empire, having taken its way westward
until it has reached its point of departure, is turning backward, an
irresistible “tide in the affairs of men.” But what can we do but
propose further and futile measures of “exclusion”? We supplicate our
Government to forbid us to employ our destroyers, to deny us the fruits
of our cupidity and prohibit us from bringing the hateful race here
in our own ships. Our courts, minded madwise, make in good faith the
monstrous assumption that the writ of _habeas corpus_ is a right which
we, having invented it, are bound to share with races that never heard
of it. Our churches, gone clean daft in pursuit of souls never caught
and not worth the catching, pull the strings of their God to a gesture
of injunction and bid us respect the brotherhood of man. Every moment
and at all points we feel the baffling hand thrusting us roughly down
and back, while this awful invasion pours in upon us with augmenting
power.
Not for an instant has the refluent wave been stayed. Every American
city has its “Chinatown,” every American village its scouts and
pioneers of the movement. On the Pacific Coast the Japanese have
a foothold everywhere, monopolizing entire industries in cities
and valleys, owning the lands that once they leased and charitably
employing their former employers. And all along the line of every
growing railway in the west may be seen the turbaned Hindu bending to
his work and biding his time to be a “shipper.”
As it is, it will be: the Oriental races are in motion westward, and
this continent is doomed to their occupancy. A higher, sterner law than
any of man’s devising is in action here. Fate has exercised the right
of eminent domain and condemned this New World to the use of ancient
races. For four hundred years the European has been wresting it from
the Indian; within one-half the time the Asian will have accomplished
its conquest from the European. There is no help for us: as we did unto
others it shall be done unto us, and the Asian shall be master here. It
is comforting to know that we shall have had a hand in our undoing; one
does not like to be a “dead-head” in any enterprise.
No; we shall not kill the Chinese, nor will they “go” without
killing—nor cease to come. As surely as the sun shall rise each day,
so surely each day will his beams gild the ever advancing flag of this
irresistible migration. Beneath the feet of that mighty host the arts
and sciences of the Aryan, his laws and letters, his religions and
languages, the very body and soul of his civilization will be trampled
out of record, out of memory, out of tradition. It is not a sunny
picture; what need to look upon it? I invite to despair; but there
stands the dear American statesman, parchment in hand—a new exclusion
law! His face shines in the dawning of another hope; in his eyes is the
morning of a new era. Between the two of us—him and me—all patriots may
be united: each with a prophet of his choice. It is clear whom ye will
choose, but I hope I don’t intrude.