The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

"It is."

"And of all races, the Briton is most like us?"

"Yes."

"Then the Jap ought to hate us with all his heart?"

"He ought, Socrates," said the Marchesa. "And," continued the girl, making a little courtesy to the Duke of Dorset, "the Briton ought to love us with all his heart?"

The Marchesa laughed. "I leave the Duke of Dorset to answer for his people."

The Duke put down his cup. "With all our heart," he said.

But the Marchesa was not to be diverted. "I think," she said, "you are sounding deeper waters than you suspect. We know how General Ian Hamilton said he felt when he saw the first white prisoners taken by the Japanese in Manchuria; and we know that Canada has had the same trouble on her Pacific Coast as the United States. This family feeling of the white man for the white man may prove stronger than any state policy." She turned to the Duke of Dorset. "The riots in Vancouver," she said, "are the flying straws."

"Both nations," said the Duke of Dorset, "ought firmly to suppress these outbreaks. Vancouver ought no more to be permitted to jeopardize the policy of England than California or Oregon ought to be permitted to involve the foreign policy of the United States. I am going out to Canada to look a little into this question for myself."

"And you will find," said the Marchesa, "what any woman could tell you, that these outbursts are only the manifestations of a deep-seated racial antipathy; an instinctive resistance of all the English-speaking-people alike to having the frontier of the white man's dominion thrust back by the Asiatic."