Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

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.