For example, the Tokio Yorodzu wrote early in 1916: “Japan has been most faithful to the requirements of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and yet the treatment meted out to our countrymen in Canada, Australia, and other British colonies has been a glaring insult to us.”[186] A year later a writer in The Japan Magazine declared: “The agitation against Japanese in foreign countries must cease, even if Japan has to take up arms to stop it. She should not allow her immigration to be treated as a race-question.”[187] And in 1919 the Yorodzu thus paid its respects to the exclusionist activity of our Pacific coast States: “Whatever may be their object, their actions are more despicable than those of the Germans whose barbarities they attacked as worthy of Huns. At least, these Americans are barbarians who are on a lower plane of civilization than the Japanese.”[188]
The war produced no letting down of immigration barriers along the white world’s exposed frontiers, where men are fully alive to the peril. But the war did produce temporary waverings of sentiment in the United States, while in Europe colored labor was imported wholesale in ways which may have ominous consequences.
Our own acute labor shortage during the war, particularly in agriculture, led many Americans, especially employers, to cast longing eyes at the tempting reservoirs of Asia. Typical of this attitude is an article by Hudson Maxim in the spring of 1918. Mr. Maxim urged the importation of a million Chinese to solve our farming and domestic-service problems.
“If it is possible,” he wrote, “by the employment of Chinese methods of intensive farming, to increase the production of our lands to such an extent, how stupendous would be the benefit of wide introduction of such methods. The exhausted lands of New England could be made to produce like a tropical garden. The vast areas of the great West that are to-day not producing 10 per cent of what they ought to produce could be made to produce the other 90 per cent by the introduction of Chinese labor.... The average American does not like farming. The sons of the prosperous farmers do not take kindly to the tilling of the soil with their own hands. They prefer the excitement and the diversions and stimulus of the life of city and town, and they leave the farm for the office and factory....
“Chinese, imported as agricultural laborers and household servants, would solve the agricultural labor problem and the servant problem, and we should have the best agricultural workers in the world and the best household servants in the world, in unlimited numbers.”[189]
Now I submit that such arguments, however well-intentioned, are nothing short of race-treason. If there be one truth which history has proved, it is the solemn truth that those who work the land will ultimately own the land.
Furthermore, the countryside is the seed-bed from which the city populations are normally recruited. The one bright spot in our otherwise dubious ethnic future is the fact that most of our unassimilable aliens have stopped in the towns, while many of the most assimilable immigrants have settled in the country, thus reinforcing rather than replacing our native American rural population. Any suggestion which advocates the settlement of our countryside by Asiatics and the deliberate driving of our native stocks to the towns, there to be sterilized and eliminated, is simply unspeakable.
Fortunately, such fatal counsels were with us never acted upon, albeit they should be remembered as lurking perils which will probably be urged again in future times of stress. But during Europe’s war-agony, yellow, brown, and black men were imported wholesale, not only for the armies, but also for the factories and fields. These colored aliens have mostly been shipped back to their homes. Nevertheless, they have carried with them vivid recollections of the marvellous West, and the tale will spread to the remotest corners of the colored world, stirring hard-pressed colored bread-seekers to distant ventures. Furthermore, Europe has had a practical demonstration of the colored alien’s manifold usefulness, and if Europe’s troubles are prolonged, the colored man may be increasingly employed there both in peace and war.
Even during the war the French and English working classes felt the pressure of colored competition. Race-feeling grew strained, and presently both England and France witnessed the (to them) unwonted spectacles of race-riots in their port-towns where the colored aliens were most thickly gathered. An American observer thus describes the “breaking of the exclusion walls erected against the Chinese”:
“In London, one Wednesday evening, twenty-four months ago (i. e., in 1916), there was a mass-meeting held on the corner of Piggot Street, Limehouse, to protest against the influx of John Chinaman into bonny old England.... The London navvies that night heard a protest against ‘the Chinese invasion’ of Britain. They knew that down on the London docks there were two Chinamen to every white man since the coming of war. They knew that many of these yellow aliens were married. They knew, too, that a big Chinese restaurant had just opened down the West India Dock Road.