A decade ago Putnam Weale wrote warningly: “If China is forced, owing to the short-sighted diplomacy of those for whom the question has really supreme importance, to make common cause with Japan as a pis aller, then it may be accepted as inevitable that in the course of time there will be created a mare clausum, which will extend from the island of Saghalien down to Cochin-China and Siam, including all the island-groups, and the shores of which will be openly hostile to the white man....
“And since there will be no danger from the competition of white workmen, but rather from the white man’s ships, the white man’s merchants, his inventions, his produce—it will be these which will be subjected to humiliating conditions.... It is not a very far cry from tariffs on goods to tariffs and restrictions on foreign shipping, on foreign merchants, on everything foreign—restrictions which by imposing vast and unequal burdens on the activities of aliens will soon totally destroy such activities.... What can very easily happen is that the federation of eastern Asia and the yellow races will be finally arranged in such a manner as to exclude the white man and his commerce more completely than any one yet dreams of.”[146]
This latter misfortune may be averted by concerted white action, but it is difficult to see how the gradual elimination of white goods from Asiatic markets as the result of successful Asiatic competition can be averted. Certainly the stubborn maintenance of white political domination over a rebellious Asia would be no remedy. That would merely intensify swadeshi boycotts in the subject regions, while in the lands freed from white political control it would further Japan’s policy of excluding everything white. If Asiatics resolve to buy their own products instead of ours we may as well reconcile ourselves to the loss. Here again frank recognition of the inevitable will enable us to take a much stronger and more justifiable position on the larger world-aspects of the problem.
For Asia’s industrial transformation is destined to cause momentous reactions in other parts of the globe. If Asiatic industry really does get on an efficient basis, its potentialities are so tremendous that it must presently not only monopolize the home-markets but also seek to invade white markets as well, thus presenting the white world with commercial and economic problems as unwelcome as they will be novel.
Again, industrialization will in some respects aggravate Asiatic longings for migration and dominion. In my opening pages I mentioned industrialization as a probable reliever of population-pressure in Asiatic countries by affording new livelihoods to the congested masses. This is true. But, looking a trifle farther, we can also see that industrialization would stimulate a further prodigious increase of population. Consider the growth of Europe’s population during the nineteenth century under the stimulus of the industrial revolution, making possible the existence in our industrialized Europe of three times as many people as existed in the agricultural Europe of a hundred years ago. Why should not a similar development occur in Asia? To-day Asia, though still upon a basis as agricultural as eighteenth-century Europe, contains fully 900,000,000 people. That even a partially industrialized Asia might support twice that number would (judging by the European precedent) be far from improbable.
But this would mean vastly increased incentives to expansion—commercial, political, racial—beyond the bounds of Asia. It would mean intensified encroachments, not only upon areas of white settlement, but perhaps even more upon non-Asiatic colored regions of white political control like Africa and tropical America. Here again we see why the white man, however conciliatory in Asia, must stand like flint in Africa and Latin America. To allow the whole tropic belt clear round the world to pass into Asiatic hands would practically spell white race-suicide.
Professor Pearson paints a truly terrible picture of the stagnation and hopelessness which would ensue. “Let us conceive,” he writes, “the leading European nations to be stationary, while the black and yellow belt, including China, Malaysia, India, central Africa, and tropical America, is all teeming with life, developed by industrial enterprise, fairly well administered by native governments, and owning the better part of the carrying trade of the world. Can any one suppose that, in such a condition of political society, the habitual temper of mind in Europe would not be profoundly changed? Depression, hopelessness, a disregard of invention and improvement, would replace the sanguine confidence of races that at present are always panting for new worlds to conquer. Here and there, it may be, the more adventurous would profit by the traditions of old supremacy to get their services accepted in the new nations, but as a rule there would be no outlet for energy, no future for statesmanship. The despondency of the English people, when their dream of conquest in France was dissipated, was attended with a complete decay of thought, with civil war, and with a standing still, or perhaps a decline of population, and to a less degree of wealth.... It is conceivable that our later world may find itself deprived of all that is valued on earth, of the pageantry of subject provinces and the reality of commerce, while it has neither a disinterred literature to amuse it nor a vitalized religion to give it spiritual strength.”[147]
To sum up: The economic phase of the colored peril, though not yet a major factor, must still be seriously reckoned with by forward-looking statesmanship as something which will increasingly complicate the relations of the white and non-white worlds. In fact, even to-day it tends to intensify Asiatic desires for expansion, and thus exacerbates the third, or migratory, phase of the colored peril, which is already upon us.
The question of Asiatic immigration is incomparably the greatest external problem which faces the white world. Supreme phase of the colored peril, it already presses, and is destined to press harder in the near future. It infinitely transcends the peril of arms or markets, since it threatens not merely our supremacy or prosperity but our very race-existence, the wellsprings of being, the sacred heritage of our children.
That this is no overstatement of the issue, a bare recital of a few biological axioms will show. We have already seen that nothing is more unstable than the racial make-up of a people, while, conversely, nothing is more unchanging than the racial divisions of mankind. We have seen that true amalgamation is possible only between members of the same race-stock, while in crossings between stocks even as relatively near together as the main divisions of the white species, the race-characters do not really fuse but remain distinct in the mixed offspring and tend constantly to resort themselves as pure types by Mendelian inheritance. Thus a country inhabited by a mixed population is really inhabited by different races, one of which always tends to dominate and breed the other out—the outbred strains being lost to the world forever.