The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy Part 15

So Australia has raised drastic immigration barriers conceived on the lines laid down by Sir Henry Parkes many years ago: "It is our duty to preserve the type of the British nation, and we ought not for any consideration whatever to admit any element that would detract from, or in any appreciable degree lower, that admirable type of nationality. We should not encourage or admit amongst us any cla.s.s of persons whatever whom we are not prepared to advance to all our franchises, to all our privileges as citizens, and all our social rights, including the right of marriage. I maintain that no cla.s.s of persons should be admitted here who cannot come amongst us, take up all our rights, perform on a ground of equality all our duties, and share in our august and lofty work of founding a free nation."[173]

From Canada rises an equally uncompromising determination. Listen to Mr.

Vrooman, a high official of British Columbia: "Our province is becoming Orientalized, and one of our most important questions is whether it is to remain a British province or become an Oriental colony--for we have three races demanding seats in our drawing-room, as well as places at our board--the j.a.panese, Chinese, and East Indian."[174] And a well-known Canadian writer, Miss Laut, thus defines the issue: "If the resident Hindu had a vote--and as a British subject, why not?--and if he could break down the immigration exclusion act, he could outvote the native-born Canadian in ten years. In Canada are 5,500,000 native-born, 2,000,000 aliens. In India are hundreds of millions breaking the dikes of their own natural barriers and ready to flood any open land. Take down the barriers on the Pacific coast, and there would be 10,000,000 Hindus in Canada in ten years."[175]

Our Pacific coast takes precisely the same att.i.tude. Says Chester H.

Rowell, a California writer: "There is no right way to solve a race problem except to stop it before it begins.... The Pacific coast is the frontier of the white man's world, the culmination of the westward migration which is the white man's whole history. It will remain the frontier so long as we regard it as such; no longer. Unless it is maintained there, there is no other line at which it can be maintained without more effort than American government and American civilization are able to sustain. The mult.i.tudes of Asia are awake, after their long sleep, as the mult.i.tudes of Europe were when our present flood of immigration began. We know what could happen, on the Asiatic side, by what did happen and is happening on the European side. On that side we have survived....

But against Asiatic immigration we could not survive. The numbers who would come would be greater than we could encyst, and the races who would come are those which we could never absorb. The permanence not merely of American civilization, but of the white race on this continent, depends on our not doing on the Pacific side what we have done on the Atlantic coast."[176]

Says another Californian, Justice Burnett: "The Pacific States comprise an empire of vast potentialities and capable of supporting a population of many millions. Those now living there propose that it shall continue to be a home for them and their children, and that they shall not be overwhelmed and driven eastward by an ever-increasing yellow and brown flood."[177]

All "economic" arguments are summarily put aside. "They say," writes another Californian, "that our fruit-orchards, mines, and seed-farms cannot be worked without them (Oriental laborers). It were better that they never be developed than that our white laborers be degraded and driven from the soil. The same arguments were used a century and more ago to justify the importation of African labor.... As it is now, no self-respecting white laborer will work beside the Mongolian upon any terms. The proposition, whether we shall have white or yellow labor on the Pacific coast, must soon be settled, for we cannot have both. If the Mongolian is permitted to occupy the land, the white laborer from east of the Rockies will not come here--he will shun California as he would a pestilence. And who can blame him?"[178]

The middle as well as the working cla.s.s is imperilled by any large number of Orientals, for "The presence of the j.a.panese trader means that the white man must either go out of business or abandon his standard of comfort and sink to the level of the Asiatic, who will sleep under his counter and subsist upon food that would mean starvation to his white rival."[179]

Indeed, Californian a.s.sertions that Oriental immigration menaces, not merely the coast, but the whole continent, seem well taken. This view was officially indorsed by Mr. Caminetti, Commissioner-General of Immigration, who testified before a Congressional committee some years ago: "Asiatic immigration is a menace to the whole country, and particularly to the Pacific coast. The danger is general. No part of the United States is immune. The Chinese are now spread over the entire country, and the j.a.panese want to encroach. The Chinese have become so acclimated that they can prosper in any part of our country.... I would have a law to register the Asiatic laborers who come into the country. It is impossible to protect ourselves from persons who come in surrept.i.tiously."[180]

Fortunately, the majority of thinking Americans are to-day convinced that Oriental immigration must not be tolerated. Most of our leading men have so expressed themselves. For example, Woodrow Wilson, during his first presidential campaign, declared on May 3, 1912: "In the matter of Chinese and j.a.panese coolie immigration, I stand for the national policy of exclusion. The whole question is one of a.s.similation of diverse races. We cannot make a h.o.m.ogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race. Their lower standard of living as laborers will crowd out the white agriculturist and is in other fields a most serious industrial menace. The success of free democratic inst.i.tutions demands of our people education, intelligence, and patriotism, and the State should protect them against unjust and impossible compet.i.tion. Remunerative labor is the basis of contentment. Democracy rests on the equality of the citizen. Oriental coolieism will give us another race-problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson."[181]

The necessity for rigid Oriental exclusion is nowhere better exemplified than by the alarm felt to-day in California by the extraordinarily high birth-rate of its j.a.panese residents. There are probably not over 150,000 j.a.panese in the whole United States, their numbers being kept down by the "Gentlemen's Agreement" entered into by the j.a.panese and American Governments. But, few though they are, they bring in their women--and these women bring many children into the world. The California j.a.panese settle in compact agricultural colonies, which so teem with babies that a leading California organ, the Los Angeles _Times_, thus seriously discusses the matter:

"There may have been a time when an anti-j.a.panese land bill would have limited j.a.panese immigration. But such a law would be impotent now to keep native j.a.panese from possessing themselves of the choicest agricultural and horticultural land in California. For there are now more than 30,000 children in the State of j.a.panese parentage, native-born; they possess all the rights of leasing and owners.h.i.+p held by white children born here....

The birth statistics seem to prove that the danger is not from the j.a.panese soldiers, but from the picture brides. The fruitfulness of those brides is almost uncanny.... Here is a j.a.panese problem of sufficient gravity to merit serious consideration. We are threatened with an over-production of j.a.panese children. First come the men, then the picture brides, then the families. If California is to be preserved for the next generation as a 'white man's country' there must be some movement started that will restrict the j.a.panese birth-rate in California. When a condition is reached in which two children of j.a.panese parentage are born in some districts for every white child, it is about time something else was done than making speeches about it in the American Senate.... If the same present birth-ratio were maintained for the next ten years, there would be 150,000 children of j.a.panese descent born in California in 1929 and but 40,000 white children. And in 1949 the majority of the population of California would be j.a.panese, ruling the State."[182]

The alarm of our California contemporary may, in this particular instance, be exaggerated. Nevertheless, when we remember the practically unlimited expansive possibilities of even small human groups under favorable conditions, the picture drawn contains no features inherently impossible of realization. What is absolutely certain is that any wholesale Oriental influx would inevitably doom the whites, first of the Pacific coast, and later of the whole United States, to social sterilization and ultimate racial extinction.

Thus all those newer regions of the white world won by the white expansion of the last four centuries are alike menaced by the colored migration peril; whether these regions be under-developed, under-populated frontier marches like Australia and British Columbia, or older and better-populated countries like the United States.

And let not Europe, the white brood-land, the heart of the white world, think itself immune. In the last a.n.a.lysis, the self-same peril menaces it too. This has long been recognized by far-sighted men. For many years economists and sociologists have discussed the possibility of Asiatic immigration into Europe. Low as wages and living standards are in many European countries, they are yet far higher than in the congested East, while the rapid progress of social betterment throughout Europe must further widen the gap and make the white continent seem a more and more desirable haven for the swarming, black-haired bread-seekers of China, India, and j.a.pan.

Indeed, a few observers of modern conditions have come to the conclusion that this invasion of Europe by Asiatic labor is unescapable, and they have drawn the most pessimistic conclusions. For example, more than a decade ago an English writer a.s.serted gloomily: "No level-headed thinker can imagine that it will always be possible to prevent the free migration of intelligent races, representing in the aggregate half the peoples of the world, should those peoples actively conceive that their welfare demands that they should seek employment in Europe. In these days of rapid transit, of aviation, such a measure of repression is impossible.... We shall not be destroyed, perhaps, by the sudden onrush of invaders, as Rome was overwhelmed by the northern hordes; we shall be gradually subdued and absorbed by the 'peaceful penetration' of more virile races."[183]

Now, mark you! All that I have thus far written concerning colored immigration has been written without reference to the late war. In other words, the colored-migration peril would have been just as grave as I have described it even if the white world were still as strong as in the years before 1914.

But the war has of course immensely aggravated an already critical situation. The war has shaken both the material and psychological bases of white resistance to colored infiltration, while it has correspondingly strengthened Asiatic hopes and hardened Asiatic determination to break down the barriers debarring colored men from white lands.

Asia's perception of what the war signified in this respect was instantaneous. The war was not a month old before j.a.panese journals were suggesting a relaxation of Asiatic exclusion laws in the British colonies as a natural corollary to the Anglo-j.a.panese Alliance and Anglo-j.a.panese comrades.h.i.+p in arms. Said the Tokio _Mainichi Deupo_ in August, 1914: "We are convinced that it is a matter of the utmost importance that Britons beyond the seas should make a better attempt at fraternizing with j.a.pan, as better relations between the English-speaking races and j.a.pan will have a vital bearing on the destiny of the empire. There is no reason why the British colonies fronting on the Pacific should not actively partic.i.p.ate in the Anglo-j.a.panese Alliance. Britain needs population for her surplus land and j.a.pan needs land for her surplus population. This fact alone should draw the two races closer together. Moreover, the British people have ample capital but deficiency of labor, while it is the reverse with j.a.pan.... The harmonious co-operation of Britain and her colonies with j.a.pan insures safety to British and j.a.panese interests alike. Without such co-operation, j.a.pan and Great Britain are both unsafe."[184]

What this "co-operation" implies was very frankly stated by _The j.a.pan Magazine_ at about the same date: "There is nothing that would do so much to bind East and West firmly together as the opening of the British colonies to j.a.panese immigration. Then, indeed, Britain would be a lion endowed with wings. Large numbers of j.a.panese in the British colonies would mean that Britain would have the a.s.sistance of j.a.pan in the protection of her colonies. But if an anti-j.a.panese agitation is permitted, both countries will be making the worst instead of the best of the Anglo-j.a.panese Alliance. Thus it would be allowed to make j.a.pan an enemy instead of a friend. It seems that the British people both at home and in the colonies are not yet alive to the importance of the policy suggested, and it is, therefore, pointed out and emphasized before it is too late."[185]

The covert threat embodied in those last lines was a forerunner of the storm of anti-white abuse which rose from the more bellicose sections of the j.a.panese press as soon as it became evident that neither the British Dominions nor the United States were going to relax their immigration laws. Some of this anti-white comment, directed particularly against the Anglo-Saxon peoples, I have already noted in the second chapter of this book, but such comment as bears directly on immigration matters I have reserved for discussion at this point.

For example, the Tokio _Yorodzu_ wrote early in 1916: "j.a.pan has been most faithful to the requirements of the Anglo-j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan Magazine_ declared: "The agitation against j.a.panese in foreign countries must cease, even if j.a.pan 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 j.a.panese."[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 att.i.tude 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 una.s.similable aliens have stopped in the towns, while many of the most a.s.similable 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 s.h.i.+pped 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 cla.s.ses felt the pressure of colored compet.i.tion. 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 ma.s.s-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.

"The Sailors' and Firemen's Union--one of the most powerful in England--carried the protest into the Trades-Union Congress held at Birmingham. There, alarm was voiced at the steady increase in the number of Chinese hands on Britain's s.h.i.+ps. It was an increase, true, since the stress of war-times had begun to try Britain. But what England's sons of the seven seas wanted to know was: when is 'this Orientalizing' of the British marine to stop?... The seamen's unions were willing to do their bit for John Bull, but they wondered what was going to happen after the coming of peace. Would the Chinese continue to man John Bull's s.h.i.+ps?...

"Such is one manifestation of the decisive lifting of gates and barriers that has taken place since the white world went to war. To-day the Chinese--for decades finding a wall in every white man's country--are numbered by the tens of thousands in the service of the Allies. They have made good. They are a war-factor.... All told, 200,000 Chinese are 'carrying on' in the war-zone, laboring behind the lines, in munition-works and factories, manning s.h.i.+ps....

"What will happen when peace comes upon this red world--a world turned topsyturvy by the white man's Great War, which has taken John Chinaman from Shantung, Chihli, and Kw.a.n.gtung to that battle-ground in France?...

That makes the drafting of China's man-power one of the most supremely important events in the Great War. The family of nations is taking on a new meaning--John Chinaman overseas has a place in it. As Italian harvest-labor before the war went to and from Argentina for a few months'

work, so the Chinese have gone to Europe under contract and go home again.

Perhaps this action will have a bearing on the solution of the Far West's agricultural labor problem.

"Do not believe for a moment that the armies of Chinese in Europe will forget the lessons taught them in the West. When these sons of Han come home, the Great War will be found to have given birth to a new East."[190]

So ends our survey. It has girdled the globe. And the lesson is always the same: Colored migration is a _universal_ peril, menacing every part of the white world. Nowhere can the white man endure colored compet.i.tion; everywhere "the East can _underlive_ the West." The grim truth of the matter is this: The whole white race is exposed, immediately or ultimately, to the possibility of social sterilization and final replacement or absorption by the teeming colored races.

What this unspeakable catastrophe would mean for the future of the planet, and how the peril may be averted, will form the subject of my concluding pages.

CHAPTER XII

THE CRISIS OF THE AGES

Ours is a solemn moment. We stand at a crisis--the supreme crisis of the ages. For unnumbered millenniums man has toiled upward from the dank jungles of savagery toward glorious heights which his mental and spiritual potentialities give promise that he shall attain. His path has been slow and wavering. Time and again he has lost his way and plunged into deep valleys. Man's trail is littered with the wrecks of dead civilizations and dotted with the graves of promising peoples stricken by an untimely end.

Humanity has thus suffered many a disaster. Yet none of these disasters were fatal, because they were merely local. Those wrecked civilizations and blighted peoples were only parts of a larger whole. Always some strong barbarians, endowed with rich, unspoiled heredities, caught the falling torch and bore it onward flaming high once more.

Out of the prehistoric shadows the white races pressed to the front and proved in a myriad ways their fitness for the hegemony of mankind.

Gradually they forged a common civilization; then, when vouchsafed their unique opportunity of oceanic mastery four centuries ago, they spread over the earth, filling its empty s.p.a.ces with their superior breeds and a.s.suring to themselves an unparalleled paramountcy of numbers and dominion.

Three centuries later the whites took a fresh leap forward. The nineteenth century was a new age of discovery--this time into the realms of science.

The hidden powers of nature were unveiled, incalculable energies were tamed to human use, terrestrial distance was abridged, and at last the planet was integrated under the hegemony of a single race with a common civilization.

The prospects were magnificent, the potentialities of progress apparently unlimited. Yet there were commensurate perils. Towering heights mean abysmal depths, while the very possibility of supreme success implies the possibility of supreme failure. All these marvellous achievements were due solely to superior heredity, and the mere maintenance of what had been won depended absolutely upon the prior maintenance of race-values.

Civilization of itself means nothing. It is merely an effect, whose cause is the creative urge of superior germ-plasm. Civilization is the body; the race is the soul. Let the soul vanish, and the body moulders into the inanimate dust from which it came.

Two things are necessary for the continued existence of a race: it must remain itself, and it must breed its best. Every race is the result of ages of development which evolves specialized capacities that make the race what it is and render it capable of creative achievement. These specialized capacities (which particularly mark the superior races), being relatively recent developments, are highly unstable. They are what biologists call "recessive" characters; that is, they are not nearly so "dominant" as the older, generalized characters which races inherit from remote ages and which have therefore been more firmly stamped upon the germ-plasm. Hence, when a highly specialized stock interbreeds with a different stock, the newer, less stable, specialized characters are bred out, the variation, no matter how great its potential value to human evolution, being _irretrievably lost_. This occurs even in the mating of two superior stocks if these stocks are widely dissimilar in character.

The valuable specializations of both breeds cancel out, and the mixed offspring tend strongly to revert to generalized mediocrity.