Blow up one tunnel on each line and do the job thoroughly and well as the Japanese would do it,—that's the Japanese way,—and it would be weeks and perhaps months before one single train could be got in or out of California.
We may rest assured also that the Japanese, when they undertook that job, would not stop with blowing up one tunnel. They would blow up a dozen on every one of the railroads mentioned, and bridges and culverts and trestles. With a little dynamite, mixed with the reckless daring of the Japanese, California could be made inaccessible to an army from the east, except by sea, for a longer time than it would take to transport an army from Asia to America.
No doubt the idea will occur to some that soldiers could be transported from the Atlantic Coast to California through the Panama Canal in time to meet such an emergency. But what would we transport them in? We have no ships. And it is no sure thing that the Japanese would not get the Panama Canal blown up and stop that channel of transportation, if war was begun between them and the United States. It would require nothing more desperate to accomplish it than we know the Japanese are ready for at any time the opportunity offered—nothing more desperate than Hobson's feat at Santiago.
The Japanese are a farsighted people and war with them is an exact science. They master every detail in advance. They proved that in their war with Russia. There can be no doubt—not because they have any hostile intentions towards the United States, but merely because it is a part of the duty of their professional military scientists—that the plans are now made in the war office at Tokio, for every detail of the whole project outlined above for dynamiting every railroad into California and blowing up the Panama Canal, in the event of war between the United States and Japan. And it is quite probable that the men are detailed for the job and the dynamite carefully stored away with which to do the job, if the necessity arose for it.
The Japanese do not want a war with the United States.
Neither did they want a war with Russia. But it is a part of their religion to be prepared for war. It is the thorough Japanese way. Their way is not our way. They take no chances. We do nothing else but take chances. Because what we are doing or have done for national defense is as nothing.
All we spend on our navy is wasted, so far as any possible trouble with Japan is concerned. If war came, it would come like the eruption of Mont Pelée, so unexpectedly and quickly that escape was impossible. The people of the United States, if we have a war with Japan, will awaken some morning and read in all their morning papers that the Panama Canal has been blown up, and that tunnels on all the railroads into California and the Colorado River Bridges at Yuma and Needles have been blown up; that the 50,000 or more Japanese soldiers in California have mobilized and intrenched themselves in impregnable positions in the mountains of the coast range near the ocean; that Japanese steamers have landed 10,000 more Japanese soldiers to reënforce the 50,000 already in California; that those same steamers have brought arms, ammunition, field artillery, aëroplanes, and a complete equipment for a field campaign by this Japanese army of 60,000 men; that those Japanese steamers have landed at some entirely unfortified roadstead in California: Bodega Bay or Tomales Bay or Purissima or Pescadero or Santa Cruz or Monterey or Port Harford or any one of a dozen other places where they could land between San Diego and Point Arena.
The Japanese making this landing would within two days make a junction with the Japanese already in California. Then an army of occupation of 60,000 veteran soldiers is in military control of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley.
How surprised the good people would be who have been so anxious to get enough of the "inferior people" who are willing to do "squat labor" for the American owners of the country, which had just been taken away from them by the Japanese. Does it make any American proud to contemplate that the whole situation above outlined is not only possible but that it is the exact thing that would happen if we had a war with Japan?
Soldiers for defense? We could not get them there in time, and we cannot maintain a soldier in idleness in a barracks in California for every Japanese who is industriously earning his living in a potato field, doing "squat labor" and thinking the while that he wishes his country would make it possible, as she could so easily do, for him to own a potato patch himself. Let no one imagine he is not thinking about it. The Japanese are a farsighted and subtle people, with brains four thousand years old.