will be at once evident to any thoughtful reader that the Pacific states are not in a position to desire any considerable alien population. The eastern states may be able to welcome, by the hundred thousand, foreigners of a type that cannot be assimilated; but at present the Pacific states cannot with safety assume such a burden.

For any real understanding of the situation, it should be noted, in the second place, that the people of the coast states are in a measure isolated from the thickly populated districts of the United States. To the east lies Nevada, with an area exceeding that of New York State and Pennsylvania combined, yet supporting a population of only about fifty thousand in all; and adjoining it on the south is the vast State of Arizona, with approximately three times as many inhabitants. It thus happens that the three million people who thinly fringe the Pacific slope are separated from the more densely populated centres by hundreds of miles of mountain and desert, spanned at great intervals by long stretches of lonely, single-track railway.

Over against this somewhat isolated outpost of Caucasian civilization lies China with a population of 450,000,000 crowded into an area but little larger than that of the United States, and Japan, supporting its 50,000,000 inhabitants upon a territory about the size of California. That these prolific eastern nations greatly need an outlet for surplus population is obvious; and it is equally clear that they would ultimately overflow our inviting shores in great waves were there no barriers to prevent.

A careful investigation could not fail to discredit the offhand judgment (now, doubtless, prevalent in some quarters) that the restiveness of the people of the coast is the result of race prejudice merely. Some race prejudice there no doubt is; but that is not the factor which has brought the immigration question to an issue. The Chinese have long been on the coast; but their retiring ways and the fact that their business activity is limited for the most part to a few special fields has made their presence little felt. The coming of the Japanese has put an entirely new face upon the matter. At least four factors have contributed to this result: (1) The numbers in which the Japanese have come; (2) the fact that immigration from Japan is not controlled by our federal government; (3) the economic disturbance caused by this immigration, and (4) the attitude taken by the Japanese themselves.

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The thing of prime importance in this whole question is that definite understanding regarding Oriental immigration be reached while matters are yet in the incipient stage. Now is the time to settle the matter, while the situation is well within our control. If it is allowed to drift along, there is grave danger that we shall bequeath to the next generation a problem which they will be unable to handle. The Chinese alone could repeople the United States two or three times over without depopulating their own country. And those who have seen at first hand conditions in the southern states, where two races come into daily contact and yet may not amalgamate, will surely agree that it would be little short of a crime to allow an analogous situation to develop in another large section of our country— a situation which in this case would be further complicated by the attitude of the home governments of the alien peoples.

Dr. S. L. Gulick, who has recently been lecturing in the United States in the interest of the Japanese, has described in an interesting way the elaborate bureau of information maintained by the Japanese, whereby agents in every country gather accurate information bearing on all important questions for the use of the home government. It is very probable, therefore, that conditions on the Pacific coast are better known in Tokio than in Washington. If this be a fact, the moral is obvious.

In conclusion I would add a suggestion or two: (1) That it ought not to be regarded as an evidence of ill-will towards any nation that the people of the United States desire that the Pacific coast shall remain in the unquestioned possession of Caucasians, and (2) that it is not by any means inevitable that a righteous solution of this question can be reached only through an adjustment which requires a wholesale sacrifice of the well-being of our own citizens. It would not be unnatural, of course, that the nations of the Orient, as they develop and push forward to places in the world family, should at first fail to realize that manhood's estate brings with it responsibilities and restraints as well as honors and privileges. But it may ultimately become clear to all that, in questions such as the one now under discussion, it may be the duty of an Oriental people to submit cheerfully to restrictions that are essential to the social and economic well-being of a friendly neighbor.

Harper's Weekly. 51: 1484. October 12, 1907

Real Pacific Question. Sydney Brooks

The parallel between the conditions in the American state and in the Canadian province, is, indeed, singularly close. In both districts you find a comparatively small English-speaking community scattered over a beautiful and bountiful country. Both front upon the Pacific, and are equally exposed to emigration from the Orient. Both are only in the first stage of their material development, and both suffer from a chronic shortage of labor. Each has experimented with the Chinese coolie, and each for deeper reasons than mere local trade-union jealousy has felt compelled to bring the experiment to an end.

Even the minor circumstances and expediencies of the two dilemmas are curiously similar. The immediate interest of both California and British Columbia is to import all the labor they can lay hands on. Such material progress as they have already compassed would unquestionably have been beyond their capacity to produce had it not been for the coolies of the Asiatic mainland. On both sides of the boundary-line the capitalists, there can be little question, would favor a reasonable, and even a liberal influx of Asiatic coolies, would even, I think, be prepared to evolve a community based upon a system of indentured and semi-servile labor. But the masses both in California and British Columbia, with a sounder though not necessarily a less selfish instinct, reject any such plan with unanimous ferocity. It still, however, remains the fact that the Asiatic colonies in and around San Francisco and Vancouver contribute vitally to the economic and industrial fabric of the communities in which they have settled; that the Japanese especially make cheery, industrious, peaceable immigrants, not meddling with politics, rarely if ever becoming a charge on the local treasury, but living simply and innocuously though without a trace of Chinese squalor, supporting their own churches, publishing their own papers, and providing the unskilled labor of which neither the railroads, nor the farmers, not the fruit-growers, nor the mines, nor the canneries can ever have enough.

But the question, it is rightly felt, is not one to be settled on merely utilitarian grounds. Admitting to the full the serviceableness and the virtues of the Japanese coolies, it is still pro

foundly true that their unrestricted immigration means the planting in California and British Columbia of a vast alien colony, exclusive, inscrutable, unassimilative, bound together in an offensive and defensive organization, with fewer wants and a lower standard of living than their neighbors, maintaining intact their peculiar customs and characteristics, morals, and ideals of home and family life, with neither the wish nor the capacity to amalgamate, or even conform, with the civilization upon which they have intruded, and gradually, by the mere pressure of numbers, undermining the very foundations of the white man's wellbeing. To such a visitation California and British Columbia may well object; from such a prospect they may well shrink. Their industries may be retarded, their crops go unharvested, the yield of their vineyards and fruit-farms may rot away through sheer lack of the indispensable labor, their whole progress may be checked--these are but the passing exigencies of a day. What they have to safeguard is the future and the distinctiveness of their race and civilization, and in their passionate and unalterable conviction they cannot be protected unless the free ingress of Orientals is restricted and regulated.

This is the real Pacific question—not a question of naval or commercial supremacy, but of the social and economic relations that are to obtain between the white and yellow peoples. Among the English-speaking communities that border the Pacific, whether they live under the Union Jack or under the Stars and Stripes, there exists a deep instinctive popular determination-one of those irresistible movements of opinion which the highest statesmanship may possible succeed in guiding, but which no statesmanship can hope to stem-to exclude from their sparsely-settled territories the concentrated masses of China and Japan. It is a determination ministered to by the jealousy of trade-unionism, and by all the ugly instincts of racial antipathy. But it has also its better side. The English-speaking peoples and the type of civilization, manners, morals, and beliefs which they represent, stand for a cause that demands and deserves the last support that can be given it. California, British Columbia, New Zealand, and Australia know this and feel it already. It will not be long before Great Britain and the whole of America know it and feel it, too. There is no more urgent need than that the problem of Asiatic immigration into English-speaking countries should be taken out of the hands of mobs and vested in those of statesmen.

Independent. 62: 26-33. January 3, 1907

Japanese Question from a Californian's Standpoint.
Julius Kahn

Now any one who is at all familiar with the two races, realizes fully, and will state unhesitatingly, that Occidental and Oriental civilizations will never mix. And the people of California, after an experience of over half a century with Orientals, feel that they understand this Asiatic immigration question just a little better than many of their well-meaning countrymen who live about three thousand miles away from us, and who have beautiful theories on the subject, which, however, do not work out well in practice.

We first learned to know the Chinese coolie in the early 50's. He was brought to our shores, in those pioneer days, to work in our gold mines. That was only three or four years after the discovery of the yellow metal in this "New Eldorado" had been heralded to the world.

He was a cheap workman, his wages averaging considerably lower than those of Caucasians employed in similar vocations. And because he was a cheap workman he was brought from China in increasing numbers as the years rolled on.

There is no denying the fact that he was a docile, untiring workman. As Kipling truly says, he seems to come into the world with "a devil-born capacity for doing more work than he ought." From daybreak to midnight, in season and out of season, weekdays and Sundays, more like a machine than a human being, he toiled away in his stuffy quarters, where light and air were at a premium. As he worked for a mere pittance, he rapidly drove out the white mechanic from many fields of industry. Finally race riots occurred, and California appealed to Congress for relief. After several years of agitation laws excluding Chinese laborers from the United States were placed upon our statute books, and altho sporadic attempts have been made to modify or repeal those laws, they have remained practically intact up to the present day.

And now, once more California is threatened with an Oriental invasion. Since the great disaster which overwhelmed the city of San Francisco in April last, Japanese laborers to the number, practically, of 1000 per month, have been swarming thru the