"Every Child in a Garden,Every Mother in a Homecroft, andIndividual Industrial IndependenceFor every worker in aHome of his own on the Land."
"Every Child in a Garden,Every Mother in a Homecroft, andIndividual Industrial IndependenceFor every worker in aHome of his own on the Land."
Unless the united power of the people as a whole is soon put forth to check the physical and racial deterioration now going on at such an appalling rate among the masses of our wageworkers,—the result of the wrong conditions that surround their lives,—nothing can prevent the eventual ruin of this nation. We are already on the downward course along which Rome swept to the abyss of human degeneracy in which she was at last destroyed by the same causes that are so widely at work in this country to-day.
Employers of Labor are most directly responsible for these evil conditions. They cannot shirk that responsibility. They cannot evade the fact that the menace against which we most need national defense arises from the degeneracy that we are breeding in our midst. If we cannot do both, we had far better spend our national energies and revenues in fighting the evils that are rotting our citizenship, than in building forts and fortifications or maintaining a navy and an army for defense against the remote possibility of attacks by other nations.
We hear much of the danger to New York from such an attack. New York is in far greater danger from the criminal, immoral, evil, and degenerating forces that she is nursing in her own bosom than she is from any military force that might be landed on our shores by a foreign invader. The enemies she has most to fear are her own Gunmen and Bomb-throwers; Black-handers and White-Slavers; Apaches, Dope Fiends, Gamblers, and Gangsters; Tenement House Landlords; Out-of-Works, and all the breeders of poverty, crime, insanity, disease, and human misery that are rampant in her midst,—the direct result of the system of industry and human life which she has herself created and for which she alone is responsible.
This is no overdrawn picture. It is only the briefest possible outline of the evil conditions which less than a century of the Service of Mammon has bred in that mighty metropolis. Everyone who reads the newspapers which reflect the daily events of New York City will appreciate how impossible it is to portray inwords the depth of degradation to which a great mass of humanity has sunk in that modern Babylon—rich as well as poor.
The invasion that New York City should most fear, that of Vice and Crime and Degeneracy, has been accomplished. They have captured the outer fortifications and are intrenched within the citadel. The Goths are notatthe gates,—they arewithinthe gates.
Uncle Sam has transformed the wild Apaches of the Southwest into steady and industrious laborers who have done yeoman work with the Construction Corps of the Reclamation Service in Arizona. New York is now breeding, in her modern canyons and cliff dwellings, a more bloodthirsty, cruel, and treacherous race of Apaches than were ever bred amid the mountain fastnesses and forbidding deserts of the Southwest.
Do not these domestic enemies constitute a more immediate danger than any foreign enemy?
The foreign enemy, with whose invasion the Militarists so delight to harrow our imaginations, is still in the remote distance—afuture possibility, not even a probability on the Atlantic seacoast.
The greatest merit of the plan for national defense advocated in this book is that it will safeguard against danger from these domestic enemies, who are already in our midst, at the same time that it will safeguard, in the only adequate way yet proposed, against war or any possibility of a foreign invasion.
Many see the danger of a social or political cataclysm resulting from the saturnalia of degeneracy, disease, and crime that is being bred by tenement life and congested cities. Unfortunately they see no remedy for it but a stronger central government and a bigger standing army.
This desire for a standing army to protect against internal social or industrial disturbance leads to enthusiastic advocacy, on any pretext whatever, for a bigger army and navy whenever opportunity is presented. If the truth were known, the majority of those who so vigorously advocate a bigger and still bigger army and navy, are prompted by fear of an enemy in our midst, arising from human degeneracyin cities or from social or labor conflicts, more than by any danger of conflict with another nation.
The men who have built our great congested cities have undermined the pillars of the temple of our national strength and safety. Now they want protection from the consequences of their own work, which they so justly fear. They want this nation to adopt the Roman System, which finally worked Rome's destruction. They want soldiers hired to protect them because they fear the consequences of the things they have done, just to make money, and they cannot protect themselves from the dangers their own greed for wealth, at any cost to humanity, has created.
The inevitable result of the establishment of such a system of national defense as they advocate would be a military oligarchy. Combined with our present money oligarchy, it would be politically invincible. In some great internal crisis or social and political disturbance, all power would be centralized and our government would be transformed into a militaryautocracy. From that time on we would follow in the footsteps of Rome to our certain doom as a people and a nation.
It is a curious fact that this desire for protection from internal disturbance by a hired standing army comes from the very class in the United States which was, at the last, in Rome, ground between the upper and the nether millstones—between the army above and the proletariat below—in the final working out of the Roman System. The proscriptions of the Roman Emperors, to propitiate their armies, are forgotten by the modern patricians who clamor for a large standing army.
The patrician class in this country, who are now in their hearts praying for a strong centralized military government,—patiently and persistently planning for it, and making steady progress, too,—are the very class whose estates were confiscated, and their owners proscribed and executed by thousands to enable the Roman Emperors to appropriate their wealth and from that source satisfy thedemands of the Army. The Army had to be rewarded for their services in conferring the purple on the Emperor, which they did by virtue of their military control of the government. It was the Army who made and unmade Emperors. The Emperors bought the Army with money and bribed the populace with feasts and games. The money to do both was obtained by the proscription and plunder of the wealthy patricians, the same class which in our time is now trying so hard to establish a gilded caste in New York and other great centers of wealth and a strong military government for this nation.
Whatever system of national defense is to be adopted in the United States, it must be a system in which the people themselves, as citizens and not as professional soldiers, furnish the human material for national defense. The people must control our army of citizen soldiery so absolutely that it can never be turned against their personal liberties or property rights. Let us heed the warning of Rome. It is none too soon. Let us beware of either confiscation or proscription as an evolutionfrom a military government to a military despotism.
Switzerland alone, of all the civilized nations, and the smallest of them all, stands to-day a living demonstration of the National Spirit and the National System of Universal Service to their Country that should be adopted by all the nations of the world, to the fullest extent that it can be made applicable to their conditions. The Swiss System provides adequate national defense by the entire citizenship of the nation. Any subversion of the people's liberties through the power of the Army is impossible because the people themselves constitute the Army.
Australia has already adopted the Swiss System, substantially, and in consequence will escape the danger of military domination which will fasten itself on this country if our system of national defense is to consist only of a steadily increasing standing army. If we are to escape that danger we must never lose sight of the chief merit of the Swiss System, which is that every citizen participates in it and is affected by it, and we must as nearly aspossible adapt it to the conditions existing in this country. There are many lessons that we might learn from the Swiss to our great national advantage.
If the Spirit of Switzerland, the self-reliant independence of her people, and their physical and mental vigor, individually and collectively, her national motto "All for each and each for all," dominated a nation of 100,000,000 people, like the United States, with an area of 2,973,890 square miles, exclusive of Alaska, as it does a nation of something less than 4,000,000 people, with an area of only 15,976 square miles, that Spirit and that System of national defense would soon become the universal system of the world.
The most dangerous military system for any nation, large or small, is a standing army large enough to invite attack, but not strong enough to repel it. That was the system of Belgium, and to that fact is due the destruction of Belgium. It is the present system of the United States. The most striking feature of our unpreparedness for war is the fact that it would be hopelessly impossible to defendourselves against invasion without an army so huge as to dwarf our present army into insignificance.
The Swiss System is the best for Switzerland and is no doubt the best for Australia, but when adapting it, so far as may be practicable, to the conditions existing in the United States, we must not fall into the error of assuming that numerical strength is the only thing necessary in calculating the strength of an army. Soldiers alone are not all that a nation needs for defense, no matter how well they may be trained and equipped, or drilled and officered, or supplemented by naval strength or fortifications. The foundations on which national defense must be built are social, economic, and human. The question involves every element of the problem of preserving and perpetuating even-handed justice to all, social stability, economic strength and independence, a patriotic citizenship, and a rugged, stalwart, and virile race.
The population of Switzerland is less than that of the city of London, but if London were a nation by itself, with itscongested population, human degeneration, artificial life, moral decay, and economic dependence, it would be impossible of defense from a military point of view.
Just exactly in the proportion that the United States gathers its population into great cities, does it court the same elements of weakness, but with this practical difference. London, being a part of the British Empire, is safeguarded by the whole civil and military power of that nation. Our great seaboard cities, being a part of the United States, are practically defenseless, because our people have no system or policy of national defense. Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, in the event of an attack by the invading military forces of any of the Great Powers, would be surrendered just as Brussels and Antwerp were surrendered, to save them from destruction, if for no other reason.
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 orthe 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 richlydeserve 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 thatis 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 conserveand 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 samearea 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 Japanesedanger-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 coöperation 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 treasurethat 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 Hawaiiincreased 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."
"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:
1891-190024,8061901-190564,1021905-190614,2431906-190730,226———Total133,377
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:
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 age262,694Japanese males of military age45,725
In Washington the Japanese constitute nearly one-ninth of the male population of military age:
In Washington the Japanese constitute nearly one-ninth of the male population of military age:
Caucasian males of military age163,682Japanese males of military age17,000
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."
"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 thewhole 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."
"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 Germanyhave 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, ahalf 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 militaryand 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."
"The short period of time within which Japan is able to transport her armies to this continent—200,000 men in four weeks, ahalf 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 militaryand 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 ExclusionAct, 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 deeplyrooted 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 efficientmilitary system of any nation of the world. This statement refers to thesystem. 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 virileraces. 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; andprovided 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 thatthe 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 itrots.
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 patriotismwhich 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 firstconsidered. 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 andindustrious, 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 Japanunless 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 controversyas 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 Statehas 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 problemas 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 colonizewhere 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 commercebinding 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 thePacific 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 ofMexico, 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.