Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

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.