IN the year 1890 I wrote in the San Francisco Examiner, àpropos of Chinese immigration:
“There is but one remedy—I do not recommend it: to kill the Chinese. That we shall not do: the minority will not undertake, nor the majority permit. It would be massacre now; in its own good time (too late) it will be war. We could kill the Chinese now, as we have killed the Indians; but fifty years hence—perhaps thirty—the nation that kills Chinamen will have to answer to China.”
Twenty-one years later a Chinese warship steamed into the port of Vera Cruz, Mexico, to back up a demand of the Chinese government for an indemnity for a massacre of Chinese subjects. She was a little warship, but she bore a momentous mandate, performed it and steamed away, the world as inattentive to the event as it had been to the prophecy.
Perhaps our national indifference to the portentous phenomenon came of “use and wont;” already an American president had been made to grovel at the feet of a Japanese emperor, and had truculently threatened a state of the union with war if it did not adjust its municipal laws to the will of that Asian sovereign. Clearly, as the hope was then expressed, “we have reached the end of Asiatic dictation”—the hither end, unfortunately.
All Asia is astir, looking East and West. Its incalculable multitudes are learning war and navigation; and Caucasian powers—“infatuate, blind, selfsure!”—are their tutors. Their armies are taught by European officers, their warships are built in European and American ports. All the military powers unite in maintaining “the integrity of China” and in awakening her to aggression and dominance.
Even if it were to our immediate interest to preserve the integrity of the Chinese Empire a long look ahead might disclose a greater one that would be best subserved by partition. In a single generation Japan has performed the astonishing feat of changing civilizations. It has been, for her, retrogression, for the civilization that she has discarded was superior to that which she has adopted; but in one important particular she has been the gainer by the exchange; in the matter, namely, of military power, and therefore political consequence. As by a leap, she has advanced from nowhere to the position of a first-rate power. What she has done China is doing, with this difference: China’s advance will be to a position that will dominate the world and reduce the foremost nations of to-day to second place. Trained by European officers to European methods of warfare, such an army as she can raise and equip from her four hundred millions of population will be invincible. It may overrun Europe and extinguish Christian civilization on that continent, which would not be a very good thing for it on this. It was only yesterday—a little more than two hundred years ago—that Europe came within a single battle-hazard of being an Islam dependency. If John Sobieski had been defeated under the walls of Vienna, that city, Berlin, Paris and London would to-day be Mohammedan capitals. History has not exhausted its reserve of astounding events, nor have civilizations learned the secret of stability.
It is easy to affirm, in the case of China, the impossibility of any such racial transformation as the one supposed, but fifty years ago it would have been easy to point out its impossibility in the case of Japan—if any human being had had the imagination and hardihood to suggest it. Japan has made the impossible possible, the possible a thing to be feared. As a measure of precaution, the partition of China merits the profoundest consideration.
Actual forces at the back of a great movement are seldom apparent to those engaged in directing it. Statesmanship is mostly a matter of temporary expedients for accomplishment of small purposes, but if there is to-day a really great statesman of the Caucasian race he is considering the partition of China among European nations as an alternative to the partition of European nations among the Chinese.
Meantime we occupy ourselves with laws and treaties to “exclude” Chinese and other inevitable Asians from our continent. Successive relays of American statesmen wreck themselves upon the problem and go down smiling. To some of us it is given to see that the Asian can not be excluded—that the course of empire, having taken its way westward until it has reached its point of departure, is turning backward, an irresistible “tide in the affairs of men.” But what can we do but propose further and futile measures of “exclusion”? We supplicate our Government to forbid us to employ our destroyers, to deny us the fruits of our cupidity and prohibit us from bringing the hateful race here in our own ships. Our courts, minded madwise, make in good faith the monstrous assumption that the writ of habeas corpus is a right which we, having invented it, are bound to share with races that never heard of it. Our churches, gone clean daft in pursuit of souls never caught and not worth the catching, pull the strings of their God to a gesture of injunction and bid us respect the brotherhood of man. Every moment and at all points we feel the baffling hand thrusting us roughly down and back, while this awful invasion pours in upon us with augmenting power.
Not for an instant has the refluent wave been stayed. Every American city has its “Chinatown,” every American village its scouts and pioneers of the movement. On the Pacific Coast the Japanese have a foothold everywhere, monopolizing entire industries in cities and valleys, owning the lands that once they leased and charitably employing their former employers. And all along the line of every growing railway in the west may be seen the turbaned Hindu bending to his work and biding his time to be a “shipper.”