Immigration by political periods:

1891-190024,806
1901-190564,102
1905-190614,243
1906-190730,226
———
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:

Caucasian males of military age262,694
Japanese males of military age45,725

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

Caucasian males of military age163,682
Japanese 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."

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]

[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.