As it is, it will be: the Oriental races are in motion westward, and this continent is doomed to their occupancy. A higher, sterner law than any of man’s devising is in action here. Fate has exercised the right of eminent domain and condemned this New World to the use of ancient races. For four hundred years the European has been wresting it from the Indian; within one-half the time the Asian will have accomplished its conquest from the European. There is no help for us: as we did unto others it shall be done unto us, and the Asian shall be master here. It is comforting to know that we shall have had a hand in our undoing; one does not like to be a “dead-head” in any enterprise.
No; we shall not kill the Chinese, nor will they “go” without killing—nor cease to come. As surely as the sun shall rise each day, so surely each day will his beams gild the ever advancing flag of this irresistible migration. Beneath the feet of that mighty host the arts and sciences of the Aryan, his laws and letters, his religions and languages, the very body and soul of his civilization will be trampled out of record, out of memory, out of tradition. It is not a sunny picture; what need to look upon it? I invite to despair; but there stands the dear American statesman, parchment in hand—a new exclusion law! His face shines in the dawning of another hope; in his eyes is the morning of a new era. Between the two of us—him and me—all patriots may be united: each with a prophet of his choice. It is clear whom ye will choose, but I hope I don’t intrude.
FAT BABIES AND FATE
THE modern Baby Show is a fruitful source of mischief—a degenerate successor to that ancient display whose beneficent purpose was to ascertain what ailing or deformed or merely puny infants might most advantageously be flung off a cliff. The object of the modern Baby Show is not improvement of the race by assisting Nature in “weeding out,” nor is such the practical result. Prizes, we are told, are commonly bestowed by a committee of matrons, and necessarily fall to the fattest exhibit. In the matron’s ideal “scale of being” the pudgiest, the most orbicular, babe holds the summit place, the first adiposition, so to speak.
This is not as it should be; no true improvement in the race can be effected by encouraging our young to bury their noses in their cheeks and their knuckles under a mass of tissues overlying them like a boxing-glove. The prize winners do not become better men and women than their unsuccessful but more deserving competitors; while the latter, beginning life in the shadow of a great disappointment, retain to the end of their days a sharp sense of injustice incompatible with warm and elevated sentiments. The effect on the characters of the beaten mothers is even more deplorable. Every mother of a defeated babe is convinced that her exhibit is incomparably superior, physically, intellectually and morally, to the roly-poly impostors honored by the committee of matrons. Her wrath at the unjust decision is deep, constant and lasting; it embitters her life, sours her temper and spoils her beauty. As to the fathers, the only discernible effect upon them of either winning or losing is to make them a trifle more ashamed of their offspring than they were before. “The proud and happy father” had never the advantage of existing outside the female imagination, but if he really existed the Baby Show would be fatal to both his pride and his happiness.
In enumerating the manifold mischiefs that fly from that Pandora’s-box, the Baby Show, we are perhaps not justified in mentioning the desolating effect upon the committee of matrons whose action springs the lid. It is doubtful if the disasters which themselves incur can rightly be rated as evils in the larger sense of the word; and, anyhow, the nature of these is imperfectly known; for after making their award the unhappy arbiters commonly vanish from the busy haunts of women. The places which knew them know them no more forever, and their fate is involved in obscurities pervious only to conjecture. In view of this regrettable but apparently inevitable fact, it is desirable (if the Baby Show cannot be averted) that the lady judges be selected early, in order that our citizens may bestow upon them before they are taken from us some suitable testimonial of public esteem and gratitude, attesting the popular sense of their heroism in accepting the fatal distinction.
CERTAIN AREAS OF OUR SEAMY SIDE
THE thrifty person who attends, uninvited, a wedding reception and, retiring early from the festivities, leaves the unhappy couple poorer by a few unconsidered trifles of jewelry has a just claim to the gratitude of mankind. The interests of justice demand his immunity from detection: the officer who shall molest him is hostis humani generis. Neither grave rebuke nor ridicule has sufficed to overcome and stamp out the vulgar custom of ostentatiously displaying wedding presents, with names of givers attached; perhaps it will yield to the silent suasion of the sneak-thief. To healthy and honest understandings—that is to say, to the understandings of this present writer and those who have the intelligence to think as he does—it is but faintly conceivable how self-respecting persons can do this thing. Display of any kind is necessarily repugnant to those tastes which distinguish the well-bred from those whose worth is of another sort. Among the latter we are compelled (reluctantly) to reckon those amiable beings who display coats-of-arms, crests and the like, whether they are theirs by inheritance, purchase or invention; those, we mean, who blazon them about in conspicuous places for the obvious purpose of declaring with emphasis whatever merits and advantages may inhere in their possession. In this class, also, we must place the excellent ladies and gentlemen who “boast” their descent from illustrious, or merely remote, ancestors. (The remoter the ancestor—that is to say, the less of his blood his descendant has—the greater that funny person’s pride in the distinction.) A person of sense would be as likely to direct attention to his own virtues as to those of his forefathers; a woman of modesty, to her own beauty or grace as to the high social position of her grandmother.