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 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 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: