What are the essential things for the Japanese to learn about us?
They must get a better understanding of our various race problems. They must realize that, important as the problem involving their settlers on the Pacific Coast appears to them, it is to us a minor problem—being one of the least of a number of race-problems with which we are confronted.
They must know that our population is derived from all the countries of Europe. And they must be made aware that though we have in the past viewed this situation with fatuous complacency, we no longer do so. Our old beautiful theory that the United States was properly a refuge for the oppressed of all other lands has lost a wheel and gone into the ditch. Some of us have even begun to suspect that the oppressed of other lands were in certain instances oppressed for what may have been good and sufficient cause. We have found that some of these individuals, on arriving in the United States, become so exhilarated by our free air that from oppressed they turn into oppressors who would fain take our government out of our hands and run it in the interest of the Kaiser, the Soviets, or of Mr. De Valera's interesting Republic.
With these and other hyphenated racial problems we are continually contending. We no sooner meet one than another arises. Now we must needs create an Alien Property Custodian to take a hand. Now we deport a band of the more violent Bolsheviks. Now we summon glaziers to put new windows in the Union Club in New York, where the British flag (flying in commemoration of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, three hundred years ago) was hailed with bricks by members of a congregation emerging from St. Patrick's Cathedral, across the way.
We used to speak with loving confidence of something called the "Melting Pot," which was supposed to make newly arrived immigrants into good American citizens. Sometimes it did so, but we have lately learned that its by-product consisted too often of bricks and bombs.
We do not boast about the Melting Pot any more. Having overloaded it and found it could not do the work we put upon it, we want time in which to catch up with back orders, as it were. Meanwhile no new ones must be taken.
But while the problems growing out of European immigration have of recent years troubled us most, they do not constitute our greatest race problem. Always in the background of our consciousness, like a volcano quiescent but very much alive, looms our gigantic negro problem—the problem which for the sins of our slave-importing and slave-holding forefathers we inherit, and from which, according to our characteristic way of "meeting" great quiescent problems, we are always endeavouring to hide. For it is not our way to advance upon a bull and take him by the horns. If a bull seeks to be taken by the horns he must do the advancing. We Americans all know this about ourselves, but it is our way to excuse the failing by boasting of the tussle we will give the bull if he ever gets us in a corner.
There is no need here even to outline the tragedies of the negro problem, but there is one aspect of the matter which should be spoken of. Experience has shown that whereas immigrants from Europe can ultimately be absorbed into what we may term the American race, the negro, wearing the badge of his race in the pigment of his skin, is not to be absorbed. Even the octoroon is clearly distinguishable from the white. The negro race must, so far as the future can be read, remain a race apart.
The case of the Indian affords another example of the failure of two races, separated by colour and other physical markings, to fuse. In the early days of this country's settlement, when the Indians strongly predominated, they did not absorb the then few whites. When the time came that there was an equal number of Indians and whites, still they did not fuse. And now, when but a handful remains of the once mighty Indian nations, that remnant still retains its racial integrity.
Here, however, is involved no question of racial inferiority. Whites and Indians have to some small extent intermarried, and when both parties represent the best of their respective races, not only is there no sense of degradation to either, but the white descendants of such alliances are often proud of their Indian blood.