Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

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.