Chapter VI

_The most serious menace to the future peace of this country arises not so much from the possibility of a sudden invasion in time of war by some foreign nation, as from the danger of racial conflict resulting from the slow, steadily increasing invasion of an Asiatic people in time of peace. Year after year they are coming in thousands to make their homes within the territory of the United States._

No one who has watched the steady increase of Japanese population in Hawaii and in our Pacific Coast States can fail to realize this danger. It is a danger that is already threatening us. It exists to-day, and will continue to exist every day in the future. It cannot be pushed aside. We cannot remove it by ignoring it.

Some unexpected incident may at any time start excitement and cause an explosion that would precipitate a national conflict. In such an event either Japan or the United States might be forced into war by an irresistible upheaval of public sentiment. We had that experience in the case of the blowing up of the Maine. We must not ignore the possibility that some such moving cause for war might again occur, and start a flame against which the governments and the Peace Advocates of both nations would be powerless.

It is unfortunate that the people of the United States generally have no appreciation of these facts, and give no thought to safeguarding against them. Their consideration should be approached with the most perfect friendliness and good feeling, nationally and individually, so far as the Japanese are concerned. Instead of antagonizing the Japanese, we should cultivate their good will. There is no nation on the earth--no other race of people--who more richly _deserve and merit the good will of other nations_.

Those of the Japanese who come among us should be conceded to have come with the most pacific intentions. They come from an overcrowded country to one that is sparsely inhabited--a country that is to them a Land of Promise--a Land flowing with milk and honey--another Garden of Eden. All the majority of them want is so much of it as they can cultivate with their own labor. To their minds that means both comfort and a competence. They are poor and they long to be rich. Do they differ from us in that?

They come to the Pacific Coast for the same reasons that the early settlers went into the great West and endured so many hardships to get homes on the land. They are impelled by the same desire to find the Golden Fleece that started the migration of the Pioneers of Forty-Nine. But the Japanese are coming to dig the gold out of gardens and orchards and vineyards, instead of from the placer mines.

The average American who has much land on the Pacific Coast wants a tenant. The average Japanese wants only a hoe with which to till the land. Give him the land and the hoe and he will do the rest. He does not want to hire somebody to do the work for him or to find somebody who will pay him for the privilege of doing it.

The Caucasian cultivators of the soil, where there are such, cannot stand against the competition of either the Chinese or the Japanese. The danger of racial controversy results from this economic competition. It is a struggle for the survival of the fittest. The Japanese is the strongest in that struggle. The Caucasian must succumb or fall back on his government for protection. In the case of the Chinese this controversy bred bitter strife. In the case of the Japanese it is liable at any moment to cause serious international controversy.

That danger will continue until we put a population on every acre of the rich and fertile land on the Pacific Coast. On every such acre there must be an occupant who will till the land himself--not a mere owner looking for a tenant.

The Japanese know the value of water as well as the value of land. Every cultivated acre in Japan is an irrigated acre. If we are to safeguard against the menace of conflict with Japan we must not only ourselves populate and cultivate the land that the Japanese covet, but we must conserve and use the water as well. We must do with the country what the Japanese people would do with it if it were theirs. So long as it remains, from their point of view, unoccupied and unused, they will covet it, and in the end they will possess it, unless we use and possess it ourselves in advance of them.

Look at California!

In the great central valley of that State, including the foothill country, there are 12,500,000 acres of the richest land in the world. The water with which to irrigate every unirrigated acre of it runs to waste year after year. Every acre of it could be irrigated. Every acre of it would support a family. It is so sparsely settled that to the Japanese mind it is vacant and unoccupied. The greater part of it is to-day unreclaimed. Some of it is producing grain or hay. The rest is pasture--grazing ground for herds of live stock where there should be gardens intensively cultivated and homes forming closely settled communities.

In Japan, on 12,500,000 acres, the same area as in California and no better land, they have evolved a population of expert gardeners and their families of 30,000,000 rural people. There is not land enough in Japan to give back a comfortable living as the reward for their labor. The great mass of the farming people--really they are not farmers--they are gardeners--are very poor. California holds out to them a chance for every family to become rich from their point of view. Should we wonder that they come to California?

The constant pressure of the population in Japan to overflow will make a corresponding inflowing pressure upon California. It is like the pressure of air upon a vacuum. The way to relieve the pressure is to fill the vacuum. California is the vacuum. Fill it with people of the Caucasian race who will till the soil they own with their own hands, and the pressure upon this California vacuum from Asiatic peoples will cease.

If California's garden lands were as densely populated as Belgium was before the war, there would be no Japanese danger-zone, provided the California cultivators of the soil tilled their own acres, or acre, as the Japanese do in their own country and want to do in California.

It would be necessary, in order to settle the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys of California in that way, to use for the irrigation of the San Joaquin Valley, all the flood water now wasted in the Sacramento Valley. That can be done. There is no question about it whatever. The first recommendation to do it was made by a Commission of eminent engineers appointed by General Grant, when President, to report on the irrigation of the San Joaquin Valley.

It would require large and comprehensive planning, and the cooperation of the State and the nation. But had not the nation better spend millions to populate the country the Japanese covet, than to spend millions to fight a war with them to keep them out of it. Is it not better to settle the country, and in that way settle the controversy, than to run the risk of losing all the precious lives and treasure that a war would cost, and the risk of having California devastated by that war in the same way that Belgium has been destroyed?

Ought not that awful possibility to be enough to awaken the people of the United States to the necessity of doing something, and doing it quick, _to populate the Pacific Coast_?

If anyone doubts that the Japanese are gaining a firm foothold in our territory, and a foothold that is steadily growing stronger year by year, they will be convinced by the mere statement of the facts as to the Japanese influx into the United States.

The facts relating to that influx and the menace it holds for this country in the event of a war with Japan, are dispassionately set forth in "The Valor of Ignorance," by Homer Lea, published in 1909. The author was a Californian, but had lived many years in the Orient. He had studied it deeply and thoroughly understood his subject.

In his book he calls attention to the fact that the Japanese population in Hawaii increased from 116 in 1884 to 22,329 in 1896; and from 22,329 in 1896 to 61,115 in 1909.

Then he gives us these facts:

"Japanese immigration into the Hawaiian Islands, from
1900 to 1908, has been 65,708. The departures during
this period were 42,313. The military unfit have in
this manner been supplanted by the veterans of a great
war, and the military occupation of Hawaii tentatively
accomplished.

"In these islands at the present time the number of
Japanese who have completed their active term of
service in the Imperial armies, a part of whom are
veterans of the Russian War, exceeds the entire field
army of the United States."

Of more startling importance are the facts with reference to Japanese immigration to the mainland territory of the United States, which are given in the same volume as follows:

Immigration by political periods:

1891-1900 24,806
1901-1905 64,102
1905-1906 14,243
1906-1907 30,226
------
Total 133,377

During the last six years there have come to the United
States (Report of Bureau of Immigration) 90,123
Japanese male adults.

In California the Japanese constitute more than
one-seventh of the male adults of military age:

Caucasian males of military age 262,694
Japanese males of military age 45,725

In Washington the Japanese constitute nearly one-ninth
of the male population of military age:

Caucasian males of military age 163,682
Japanese males of military age 17,000

The foregoing rapidly increasing tide of Asiatic immigration forced attention to the subject, and in 1908 the Japanese government agreed voluntarily with the United States that in future passports should not be issued by the Japanese government to laborers desiring to emigrate from Japan to the United States. This temporarily checked this class of immigration and in the year ending June 30, 1908, the total immigration fell to 16,418; the year ending June 30, 1909, to 3,275; the year ending June 30, 1910, to 2,798.

But note the steady increase since then! Year ending June 30, 1911, 4,575; year ending June 30, 1912, 6,172; year ending June 30, 1913, 8,302; year ending June 30, 1914, 8,941.

These figures, however, give no adequate conception of the actual facts, as they have developed in California during the last ten years in such a way as to stimulate racial controversy. Some of the most beautiful and productive sections of the fruit-growing regions of California have been entirely absorbed by Japanese. Caucasian communities have become Japanese communities. Such a transformation is certainly not one that is calculated to allay racial controversy.

The alien land law of California will not allay racial controversy--it will intensify it. Japan has protested against it, as she protested against our acquisition of Hawaii, and there has been no withdrawal of her protests.

The Japanese government has shown a disposition to mitigate the danger of controversy by limiting the emigration of Japanese to this country, but that government can not control her people after they come to this country. If they cannot buy land they will lease it. That leads to all the trouble indicated in the following newspaper item:

"Tacoma, Wash., Jan. 5 (1915).--The Tacoma delegation
to the legislature, which will meet on January 11, has
been notified that a bill will be introduced for a
State referendum on a law to prevent leasing of
Washington land to Asiatics. Many members of the
legislature are pledged to support the measure.

"Japanese gardeners, it is contended, are increasing in
numbers, getting the best land about the cities under
lease, and some of them lease land for 99 years or have
a trustee buy it for them. Many Japanese marry 'picture
brides' and later have their leases of titles
transferred to their infant sons and daughters born
here.

"An amendment submitted in November permitting aliens
to own land in cities was overwhelmingly defeated."

There is very little doubt that the majority of the Japanese on the Pacific Coast are soldiers, veterans of the Japanese wars, and that in case of war Japan could mobilize on our territory between the Pacific Ocean and the inaccessible mountains constituting the Cascade and Sierra Nevada Ranges, more Japanese soldiers who are right now in that territory than we have United States troops in the whole mainland territory of the United States, or will have when our army is enlisted up to its full strength of 100,000 men.

The figures given in "The Valor of Ignorance" show that in 1907 there were 62,725 Japanese of military age in the States of Washington and California. Since then, up to June 30, 1914, the Japanese immigration has been 50,481, and nearly all of those who come are men of military age. So that now we have no doubt more trained Japanese soldiers in California, Oregon and Washington, than our entire standing army if it were enlisted to its full quota of 100,000 men, including every soldier we have, wherever he may be stationed.

And at the rate they are now coming, in ten years we will have more than our entire standing army would then be if we increased it to 200,000, as the Militarists urge should be done.

_What are we going to do about it?_

That is the question that stares every citizen of the United States straight in the face.

It may be that all cannot be brought to agree as to what ought to be done, but certainly all must agree that something should be done, and it is equally certain that neither an Exclusion Law, nor an Alien Land Law, nor an Alien Leasing Law, will settle the question, or relieve the strain of racial competition that is certain, unless obviated, to eventually breed an armed conflict with Japan.

The same author who has been previously quoted, referring to the Philippine Islands, says:

"The conquest of these islands by Japan will be less of
a military undertaking than was the seizure of Cuba by
the United States; for while Santiago de Cuba did not
fall until nearly three months after the declaration of
war, Manila will be forced to surrender in less than
three weeks. Otherwise the occupation of Cuba portrays
with reasonable exactitude the manner in which the
Philippines will be taken over by Japan."

Since this was written the events of the present war have still further strengthened the Japanese power in the Pacific. First China, then Russia, and now Germany have been eliminated. To complacently assume that Japan will never have occasion to cross swords with the United States, is surely a most mistaken attitude for the people of this country to delude themselves with. It is contrary to every dictate of common sense and reason, when the people of the Pacific Coast are forced for their own protection to enact legislation which Japan interprets as a violation of her treaty rights. The average run of people in other States give no thought to the matter. They say, "Yes, California has her problem with the Japs." It is not California's problem. It is the problem of the United States.

And in calling attention to the practical impossibility of defending the Pacific Coast against Japanese invasion and occupation in the event of war, the author heretofore quoted from calls attention to the following facts, among others, showing our unpreparedness and the complete inadequacy of our defenses:

"The short period of time within which Japan is able to
transport her armies to this continent--200,000 men in
four weeks, a half million in four months, and more
than a million in ten months--necessitates in this
Republic a corresponding degree of preparedness and
rapidity of mobilization.

"Within one month after the declaration of war this
Republic must place, in each of the three defensive
spheres of the Pacific Coast, armies that are capable
of giving battle to the maximum number of troops that
Japan can transport in a single voyage. This is known
to be in excess of 200,000 men.... We have called
attention to the brevity of modern wars in general and
naval movements in particular; how within a few weeks
after war is declared, concurrent with the seizure of
the Philippines, Hawaii, and Alaska, will the conquest
of Washington and Oregon be consummated. In the same
manner within three months after hostilities have been
begun there, armies will land upon the seaboard of
Southern California.... No force can be placed on the
seaboard of Southern California either within three
months or nine months that would delay the advance of
the Japanese armies a single day.

"The maximum force that can be mobilized in the
Republic immediately following a declaration of war is
less than 100,000 men, of whom two-thirds are militia.
This force, made up of more than forty miniature
armies, is scattered, each under separate military and
civil jurisdiction, over the entire nation. By the time
these heterogeneous elements are gathered together,
organized into proper military units, and made ready
for transportation to the front, the States of
Washington and Oregon will have been invaded and their
conquest made complete by a vastly superior force....
So long as the existent military system continues in
the Republic there can be no adequate defense of any
single portion of the Pacific Coast within a year after
a declaration of war, nor the three spheres within as
many years."

Apparently neither the Militarists, nor the Passivists, nor the Pacificists, nor the Pacificators, ever give any thought or heed to the fact of danger from within as the result of a steadily growing alien population, permanently settled in the United States, and which would in the event of war constitute a force larger than any army we would have available for defense.

The chief danger of an armed conflict with Japan arises from the existence in our midst of this alien population, and the danger that the pressure of their competition may breed strife similar to that which preceded the Chinese Exclusion Act, a situation which can never be applied to Japan without creating a certainty of war immediately or in the future.

In this respect we are like a people living on the slopes below the crater of a volcano. We can never know when an eruption may take place or what its extent or consequences may be. All we do know is that the danger exists; and it is folly beyond the possibility of expression or description to ignore that fact, and perpetuate our national indifference and unpreparedness. It is this situation on the Pacific Coast, more than any other one thing, which makes the advocacy of disarmament for this nation so inconceivably dangerous unless Japan and China should also disarm, which we may rest assured they will never do. China is just entering upon a new era of militarism under a Military Dictator whose policy will be for arms and armament.

If the disarmament of the United States were to be agreed to and carried out because other nations agreed to disarm, and Japan and China were willing to disarm, then the disarmament of Asiatic nations would have to be coupled with the further safeguard of an agreement stopping emigration from Asia to America--not only to North America, but to South America as well. It is not proposed by any of the advocates of disarmament to stop such immigration, nor will it be stopped. The fact that it will continue indefinitely through the years of the future is a fact which must be recognized as fundamental in dealing with the question of national defense for the United States of America.

The economic conditions created by the Asiatic in America are more dangerous and difficult of adjustment than any problem resulting from the military or naval strength of any Asiatic nation so long as their people in times of peace will stay in Asia. But they will not stay in Asia of their own accord, and they will not be forced to do so. We must face not only the problems that will arise from a large Asiatic population on the Pacific Coast of the United States, but in South America, Central America, and Mexico.

In a few generations the Japanese will control the northern Pacific shores of South America. Peru will come to be in reality a Japanese country. The Japanese will control because they will be in a majority, just as they now constitute a majority of the population of Hawaii. They will dominate the Indian population and will absorb or supplant the Spanish just as we have done in California. In the course of time the Japanese will control Mexico in the same way, unless we control it ourselves.

It does not follow that we could not live at peace with the Japanese, if they controlled South America and Mexico, as we now live at peace with them when they only control Japan, Formosa, Sakhalin, Korea, and their sphere of influence in Manchuria, as well as Tsing Tau and their Pacific Islands.

But if we are to do so, it can only be done by meeting their economic competition and establishing within our own territory a system of physical and mental development, a social and economic system, and a system of military defense, that will not only be equal but superior to theirs.

The conflict between the races of Asia and the races of America is the age-old competition to test which is the stronger race. The fittest will survive. We cannot defend ourselves by temporary exclusion, as we have tried to do with the Chinese. It is only a question of time when China will emerge from the slumber of the centuries and provide herself with all the implements of modern warfare necessary to insist upon the same treatment for her people that we accord to other nations.

It may be a long time before an armed conflict between the United States and Japan is precipitated, but it is inevitable, unless the national policy advocated in this book is adopted. War between this country and Japan within the next forty years, unless the present trend is checked, is as inevitable as it has been at all times during the last forty years between France and Germany, with this difference:

The present European war is the result of primary causes that were so deeply rooted in wrong and injustice, that no human power could eradicate them. It is different with Japan. We have no long standing or deeply rooted controversy with Japan and we need never have if we meet the economic problem involved in this great racial competition between Asia and America. It is coming upon us, however, with the slow moving certainty of a glacier, and meet it we must. We must prevail or be overwhelmed, and unless we can face the economic conflicts involved and triumph in them, it is useless for us to undertake to hold our ground by militarism alone.

The fact undoubtedly is that of all three of the plans now before the people of the United States for national defense or for preserving peace, the most dangerous and deceptive is that of the militarists, for a bigger standing army and a bigger navy. It would create a false and misleading feeling of security from danger which would becloud the real problems involved and make their solution more difficult, if not impossible.

Japan to-day has the most efficient military system of any nation of the world. This statement refers to the _system_. Other nations may have larger armies, but Japan's military system, like that of Switzerland, is fitted into and matches with her whole social, commercial, and economic system. It is a part of the very fiber of her national being, and not an excrescence, as is our standing army.

And behind this she has the most adaptable, industrious, and physically and mentally efficient and vigorous people of the world. The danger of war between the United States and Japan is not so much a present as a future danger. Whether it is in the near future or the far future depends largely on accident.

The danger could be removed entirely if the American people would substitute intelligent study of the problem for bumptious conceit, and concerted action on right lines for aimless talk. Unless we do that our ultimate fate is as inevitable as that of Rome when she vainly strove by militarism alone to protect a decadent nation against the onslaughts of virile races. Our fate will not be so long delayed because we are now crowding into a decade the events that once evolved slowly through a century. We may reach in forty years a condition of relative weakness as against opposing forces which Rome reached only after four hundred years.

There will never be a war between Japan and the United States if the people of this country will do unto the Japanese in all things as we would desire the Japanese to do unto us, if our situations were reversed, and they occupied this country and we theirs, _provided always_, that we at the same time recognize that the Japanese are the stronger rather than the weaker race, and cannot be exploited or their labor permanently appropriated for our profit rather than theirs; and _provided further_, that we recognize that Japan is enormously overpopulated; that her population, which has grown from only four or five million in the tenth century to over fifty million in the twentieth, is increasing at the rate of over 1,000,000 a year, and that _the hive must swarm_.

This necessity sets forces in motion that are as irresistible in their workings as the laws that control the universe and direct the stars in their courses. Whenever race meets race in such a fundamental struggle for existence, the law of the survival of the fittest is inexorable. As Japan increases her population, she becomes stronger, because wherever her people go they root themselves to the soil. As we increase our population, we become weaker, because we steadily enlarge the proportion of our population that we crowd into congested cities where it _rots_.

The poison of an Industrial System resting upon a system of life that destroys Humanity is filtering into the Japanese body politic, but before it seriously degenerates their racial strength the Japanese will see its evil effects on the State, and remove the cause.

We see its evil effects on the State, but seem unable to shake off the grip of Commercialism which is responsible for it. We will never shake off that grip until we can rise to the higher level of patriotism which will subordinate Commerce and Industry to the welfare of Humanity.

Unless we are willing to accept, as the inevitable end of our civilization, the fate of all the Ancient Civilizations, we must remember that no nation can endure in which one class is exploited for the benefit of another. The same rule applies inexorably to any attempt by the people of one country to exploit the people of another and live on their labor.

If an armed conflict should be precipitated in the near future between this country and Japan it will grow out of racial controversies resulting from an effort to exploit the Japanese in the United States in the same way that we are exploiting the immigrants from European countries. The difficulty that now faces the people of the United States with reference to the Japanese problem arises from the fact that we can neither exploit, nor exclude, nor assimilate the Japanese, nor can we, under present conditions, survive their economic competition within our own territory.

Let the question of exploitation be first considered. There is a strong contingent of Americans on the Pacific Coast who openly advocate Japanese immigration. They argue that our proud and superior race will not condescend to do the "_squat labor_," as they term it, that is necessary to get the gold from the gardens of California--and from her vast plantations of potatoes, vegetables, and other food products that are grown on the marvelously fertile soil of that State. So they want the Japanese to come and do the "squat labor" while the Aristocratic Anglo-Saxon reaps the lion's share of the profits as the owner of the land.

_They tried that once with the Chinese, with what result?_

That the docile and subservient Chinese were the best field laborers that were ever found by any body of plantation-owners, and for a time the Caucasian owners of the orchards and vineyards and lordly demesnes of California prospered mightily from the profits earned for them by the labor of the lowly Chinese.

_But what happened?_

The Chinese were not only faithful and industrious, they were frugal as well. They saved their money. Soon they were not only laborers, but also capitalists, in a small way. Then they began to buy land and work in their own fields, gardens, and orchards. The industries that produced food from land as the result of intensive cultivation with human labor were rapidly passing into the hands of the Chinese. They were rapidly buying the lands which were the basis of those industries. They were ceasing to work for the benefit of another race. They worked for themselves and their own benefit.

And that was not all. One after another every manufacturing industry in California in which human labor was a large element of production was being absorbed by the Chinese. First they worked for American Manufacturers. Then they became their own employers and the American Manufacturer was forced out of business by the economic competition of a stronger race. In the end, it came to be seen of all men that the Caucasian Manufacturer, the Caucasian Wageworker, and the Caucasian Landowner, and food producer, were gradually surrendering to and being eliminated by the economic competition of the Chinese.

So we excluded the Chinese.

If we had not done so, in less than a generation the Pacific Coast would have been a Chinese Country, and no oppression or mistreatment to which they could have been subjected would have prevented it, if they had been allowed to continue the process of commercial and agricultural absorption that had progressed so far before we finally excluded them.

Now the Japanese are repeating the same process of absorption. We cannot exclude them, and if we undertook to do so, it would only be postponing the evil day, when such a policy would breed an armed conflict. The Japanese regard the law that prohibits their acquisition of land as a violation of our treaty with them. They look to our own Courts to finally decide it to be unconstitutional. It may be a long time coming, but the final result of the law preventing them from acquiring land in California will be war with Japan _unless other measures are adopted to supplement one that will ultimately prove so futile_.

The exclusion of the Japanese from the right to acquire land, but still permitting them to lease land, makes the situation more dangerous than it was before. It adds to all the dangers of the purely economic struggle which resulted from Chinese Competition, the additional danger of all the bad blood that a tenantry system inevitably develops. Every lease-hold will develop into a breeding place for friction and conflict between individual landlords and tenants, as well as conflicts between them as opposing classes, and will result finally in the same racial controversies that led up to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Already the Japanese tenantry in the Delta of the San Joaquin River have formed a protective association to enable them to oppose the organized power of the mass against any objectionable conditions imposed by their landlords, as well as to fix the rental they are willing to pay. Does anyone doubt that such a tenantry system will in time breed as much controversy as the Nonresident Landlord System has caused in Ireland?

The Japanese Tenantry System in California must in the very nature of things be a Nonresident Landlord System. It can be nothing else. The community will be Japanese. The landlord will seek a home elsewhere, in a Caucasian community. His only thought will be to get all he can from those whose labor produces his income. Their only thought will be to make that amount as small as possible. We have created another "Irrepressible Conflict." Whether we will adjust it without a resort to arms is a very grave question.

One of the most dangerous elements in this complicated problem is the self-complacent ignorance and refusal to face facts which characterizes the attitude of the people not only of the western half, but more particularly those of the eastern half of the United States. Not long ago a paroxysm of protest resulted from a rumor that a few hundred Japanese were about to settle in Michigan. But not the slightest heed is paid to the fact that a sister State has this problem already within her body politic eating like a cancer at her very vitals; that she is powerless to effectively settle the question by herself alone; and that no national disposition exists to settle it in the only way it can possibly be settled. The way to settle it is not by building more battleships, or enlarging our standing army, or in any way increasing our naval or military burdens, or doing anything that will now or hereafter tend to put the neck of the American people under the heel of militarism. There can be no settlement of this question other than the one urged in this book. The question is economic, and the settlement must be economic.

Japan wants no war with us now. Of that we may rest assured. But any such treatment of the Japanese as we extended to the Chinese would bring war instantly. Whether the racial animosity that Japanese competition within our own territory will inevitably create can be controlled, and conflict caused by it averted, may well be doubted, unless the people of the entire United States will recognize the problem as vital and national, and forthwith apply the only possible practicable solution.

We must recognize both the necessity and the right of Japanese expansion into new territories. That expansion means the upbuilding of enormous populations of Japanese in those countries. If ten millions of the most vigorous of Japan's teeming population could be transplanted from their native country to garden homes in other countries bordering the Pacific, where their allegiance to Japan would be unaffected, and colonies developed that would bear the same relation to the mother country that Canada bears to Great Britain, it would vastly benefit those who remained in Japan as well as those who emigrated. There must be such an emigration. It cannot be prevented. The United States should not oppose it.

But where shall they go?

_To the Philippines?_

There you project a controversy even by discussion. Of course Japan will not colonize the Philippines while we control them. Aside from that, the climate is undesirable. The Japanese want to colonize where they can reproduce their racial strength. The climate of the Philippines would destroy it. Generations will elapse before the Japanese will covet the Philippines in order to colonize them, though she might want them for other reasons.

_Shall they go to Manchuria?_

Yes, to some extent, but the great body of the overflowing population of Japan will not go to Manchuria.

It is a bleak, cold, dreary, and inhospitable country, already to a large extent cultivated and populated.

The Japanese will not go to Manchuria for another reason.

They are an Island people and the smell of the sea is in their nostrils. They already control the commerce of the Pacific and their ambition is to increase that commerce by every means in their power.

The colonies they will found in the future, the countries that the swarming millions from Japan will covet and occupy will border the Pacific Ocean, where the ships that fly the Japanese flag will come and go as the couriers of a great commerce binding the colonies of Japan to the mother country.

Where then will they go?

_To South America?_

Yes, to its northern shores bordering the Pacific, to Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, more particularly to Peru. In a very few years, as history runs, there will be an immense Japanese population on these Northern Pacific shores of South America. It is not at all unlikely that in less than a century there will be a larger population in South America of the Japanese race than now exists in all of Japan. It will be recruited not only from the surplus population of the mother country, but from a rapid reproduction of the Japanese among the transplanted population. There will be no race suicide among the Japanese. They will stick to the land in these new countries and breed a race as sturdy as its progenitors. They will never adopt the Anglo-Saxon system of City Congestion and consequent Racial Extinction.

_Will they go to Mexico?_

Yes, they will go to Mexico, and the Pacific Coast region of Mexico will be another breeding ground for this hardy and virile race, where likewise they will be tillers of the soil and a people hardened and strengthened by constant contact with Mother Earth.

More than that, the Mexicans will speedily be taught, if they require the lesson, that if they harm a hair in the head of a Japanese, punishment and retribution will be sure, swift, and severe. They will live at peace with the Japanese for that reason. It is the only way to have peace in Mexico, and Japan is strong enough to enforce peace and the security of the lives and property of all her people that way.

And because they will do that, they will eventually control and dominate Mexico, in a good deal the same way that England dominates India. Whenever they do that, they will protect not only their own people and their property, but that of all other peoples as well, and everybody will be as safe in Mexico as in Japan. But the waters that now run to waste in the Pacific Ocean, on the west coast of Mexico, will be harnessed to irrigate the orchards and gardens of the Japanese and an Asiatic and not a Caucasian race will possess Mexico.

"_Why?_" some one asks.

For the very simple reason that the Japanese will occupy Mexico because they want to reclaim and cultivate its waste lands, and not speculate in them or exploit somebody else who will cultivate them.

Already the Japanese are as laborers cultivating large areas owned by American Capitalists in the delta of the Colorado River. That will not last. The Japanese will before very long organize associations among themselves and acquire and own the land or some other land which they can own and cultivate for themselves. There is no alien land law in Mexico that will prevent that and there will be none. The Japanese will see to that. Neither will there ever be any long continued peace or security for life or property in Mexico until either Japan or the United States enforces it. If we do not, they will. _That is as certain as fate._

And when they undertake the task, dragged into it by some outrage on their own people, shall we stay their hand, and say to them that the Monroe Doctrine applies to Asiatic as well as to European nations?

It is only a matter of time when we will have to face that question with Japan. Japan will no more permit the Mexicans to commit outrages on the Japanese than she will permit us to do it. Some idea of the conflicts that race hatred may breed in Mexico will be gained by reading the quotation that follows from "In Mexico the Land of Unrest," by Henry Baerlin.

In the preface of that book we find this description of a "gentle and joyous passage at arms" of the Mexicans with the Chinese.

"I fancy that a number of the miscreants who, owing to
a mere misunderstanding, massacred three hundred
Chinamen in Torreon not long since--some were cut into
small pieces, some beheaded, some were tied to horses
by their queues and dragged along the streets, while
others had their arms or legs attached to different
horses and were torn asunder, some were stood up naked
in the market gardens of the neighborhood and given
over as so many targets to the drunken marksmen,
thirteen Chinese employees of Yu Hop's General Store
were haled into the street and killed with knives, two
hundred Chinamen were sheltered in the city gaol, but
all their money was appropriated and such articles of
clothing as the warders fancied. One brave girl had
nine of them concealed, and calmly she denied their
presence even when her father had gone out to argue
with the mob and had been shot for being on the Chinese
side--a number of these miscreants, I fancy, are on
other days delightful citizens."[1]

[Footnote 1: "The Mexicans are descended, on the one side," says Mr. Cunningham Graham, "from the most bloodthirsty race of Indians that the Spanish Conquerors came across, and on the other side from the very fiercest elements of the Spanish race itself--elements which had just emerged from eight hundred years of warfare with the Moors."]

Think you that the Japanese would submit to that without war? The account of this racial outrage may be overdrawn, but judging from what happened in our own country when the Chinese were being persecuted prior to the Exclusion Act, there is nothing inherently improbable in this account. It is no worse than the Turkish outrages that have often been committed on Christians in Asia Minor or in Europe.

China has submitted to all such outrages because for centuries she has been a nation of peace, but the time is not far distant when she will do so no longer.

With the United States, a nation with a government, in case of race conflict, leading to insult or injury to Japanese, we could make amends, or fight, as we chose, and we would probably make amends.

In Mexico, likely at any time to be without a government, as she is now, a conflict with Japan would be very apt to result like the recent differences between the Turks and the English in Egypt. The Land of the Montezumas would become a Protectorate of the Land of Nippon and a part of its Empire Power.

The Japanese problem would then be transferred from across the Pacific to across the Rio Grande, and Japanese cotton mills at Guaymas would get their cotton from the cotton fields of the Colorado River Valley. They would transport it by water down the Colorado River and across the Gulf of California and develop a great ocean commerce from the territory that is tributary to the Gulf of California. That includes the whole valley of the Colorado River if its transportation facilities were adequately and comprehensively developed, as the Japanese would develop it, by lines of Japanese steamers running up the Colorado River at least as far as Yuma. The American Railroads could not strangle Japanese competition.