CHAPTER XVIII.

JAPAN.

In 1906 the Governor of California said in a message to the Legislature:

"Our laws regard intermarriage (with Japanese) as miscegenation."

"They cannot become good American citizens. It is useless to attempt to make them such."

"It is useless to think they can ever mix with our people and become absorbed into our body politic."

In 1905 the California Legislature by unanimous vote of Assembly and Senate adopted and declared "that unrestricted Japanese immigration is a menace to the State."

The Board of Education of San Francisco excluded Japanese from the public schools, and the California Supreme Court declared these acts constitutional.

These acts contravene the stipulations of the treaty and the Federal Government cannot control them. This attitude was first voiced by Governor Gage of California in his biennial message to the State government in 1900, and anti-Japanese legislation also tentatively exists in the state legislatures of Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and Hawaii.

Two platforms or political programmes in recent national conventions included promised national legislation against Asiatics, which included Japanese. The candidates for the Presidency (Independent and Democrat) were rejected at the (1908) election embodying this plat

form, and diplomatic controversy with Japan was, for a time, suspended.

At the convention one of the two candidates adopted and incorporated in its platform such sentences as: "and shall protect American civilization from the contamination of Asiatic conditions."

*"We oppose Asiatic immigration . . . which tends to lower our high standard of morality."

Baron Hayashi, Japanese minister of foreign affairs, demanded and further stated that the Imperial Japanese Government would continue to demand of the United States the same rights and immunities for the Japanese, transitory and resident in the United States, as are granted the aliens of other nations (Italy for instance) in accordance with the treaty stipulations.

The legislative acts of the various States have from time to time directly violated or disregarded the rights of foreign nations, and the difficulty of the United States to continue in friendly relations with foreign nations is recognized as a fixed quantity everywhere.

Why do these conditions exist? Because treaties are violated or disregarded by State class (labor especially) legislation, lobbyists, representing great corporations whose powers are as great politically as they are financially, and the conflict of sectional State interests with Federal policy.

These, together with the indifference of the masses, to what happens abroad relating to the tariff forces national legislation to conflict with foreign treaties. The

*3% of the male and 4% of the total female population of the United States are divorced. In 1895 there were 10,500 homicides in the United States; in 1896, 10,662; 1912, 7.5 per 100,000 of population.

utter irresponsibility and weakness of the system can only result sooner or later in war.

The relations with Japan are strained over this question. The United States also arbitrarily has prohibited the colonization by Japanese of a certain area on the west coast of Mexico.

The Mexican government offered no such objection (on the contrary it courted such colonization) any more so than it objected to the colonization of Chihuahua by Mormons, United States citizens, or the development and practical colonization of the oil area (4900 square miles) in Vera Cruz by United States citizens.

In other words the United States has said to Japan: "You can't come here and you can't go there. We will dictate where you may or may not go."

In the meantime the United States' expansion in the Pacific and the fortifications erected at the doors of Japan are offensive, and Japan is resentful.

Is "America" prepared to force its issues? Can "America" enforce the positions it has assumed? Certainly not! In its present state of unpreparedness, the "Americans" and not the Japanese are alone responsible for the coming conflict. Territorial America offers all that is necessary for the maintenance of its millions and many millions more to come. Japan is territorially cramped in comparison and must expand by emigration. The position cannot be remedied by politics or diplomacy when millions of men, devout in their religious tranquillity, religious in their thousands of years of dynastic law and content in their pitiful poverty, yet fierce in their warlike heredity, demand the opportunity to expand and that demand is denied them by a people who cannot enforce the denial.

The recent military victories of these silent Asiatics over China and Russia were great lessons. So was the

The Invaders' Territory, Near Sierra Madre, Southern California The Great Strategic Barrier Over Which Relief Must Come