It is a new thing for Americans to find themselves looking towards the West with apprehension. With the possibilities of trouble from the North and from the South they are tolerably familiar, but that their Western States should ever develop into an international storm-centre would have seemed a few years ago incredible, and even now is a fact that has only half taken root in the national consciousness. Yet an observer may doubt whether there is anything in the politics of the Caribbean or in the turmoil and tangle of Central and South America, or in the inevitable clashing here and there of the interests of Canada and Newfoundland with those of the United States, that holds one-half so grave a menace to the future of American tranquillity as the well-nigh ferocious anti-Orientalism of the Pacific Coast. The problem of how to gain commercially without suffering socially from the propinquity of California to the Far East is bound, as time goes on, to become one of the most insistent perplexities of American statesmanship. Nor is it a problem in the solution of which much help is to be looked for from California herself. That State has but two affirmations to make on the subject. She is anxious to export goods to Asia. She refuses to import Asiatics in exchange. And with this simple enunciation of her policy, she shifts the responsibility for its translation into an international understanding upon the Federal Government, merely premising her intention of disregarding any treaties or conventions that seem to stand in its

ing any further to form some rough idea of what those local conditions are.

From the political and most other standpoints, California is little more than a hinterland to San Francisco, and the dominant fact of San Francisco, dominant before the earthquake and almost despotic after it, is tradeunionism. Some five years ago the city found itself on the top wave of prosperity. Money had poured into it during the Spanish war, trade with the Orient had quadrupled, discoveries of fuel oil and the utilization of the waterfalls of the Sierra had cheapened power and stimulated industry. As if by magic, San Francisco began to build and to grow. Labor was needed, and yet more labor, and partly because of the wide diffusion of the business revival and partly because of the remoteness and isolation of San Francisco, labor was not to be had. That was the chance the local unions had been waiting for. A strike began among the porters and packers and teamsters at the docks. It spread until all the sea commerce and most of the other business of San Francisco was tied up for months. There was fearful violence and bloodshed, and an appalling waste of money. Non-union teamsters were dragged from their wagons and their arms broken with iron bars to prevent their driving again; blacklegs were shot and beaten in the streets; the city became the battleground between an army of sworn deputies and an army of strikers. In the end the employers won, but their victory was worthless. They had lost the support of public sympathy by an injudicious use of the police, and by taking too broad a stand against the very principle of trade unionism. The unions put up a candidate for the Mayoralty, elected him by

a handsome majority, proceeded to convert or drive out non-union men in nearly every industry in San Francisco, and in a very short time had secured a practical monopoly of the labor market. Wages at once rose from thirty to seventy-five per cent. Three years ago in San Francisco, which was by no means the most expensive of American cities, plasterers were geting 328. a day, bricklayers, as a minimum, 24s. a day, carpenters 16s., and hod-carriers 14s. An eight-hour day, with a minimum wage of eight-shillings, was introduced into all public employments and most private businesses. The principle of unionism penetrated into every variety of calling. The sandwich men in the streets, the pin boys in the bowling alleys, piano movers, actors, lift-boys, gravediggers, musicians, newspaper writers and fish cleaners, all had their own unions. The city was practically cleared of blackleg labor. In all the sixty-two allied building trades there was not a single non-union worker, and any factory or establishment that stood out against the unions was publicly and remorselessly boycotted. The city, its politics, and its business were absolutely in the grip of the Labor Trust.

As it was then, so more or less it has always been for the last twenty years, and so, allowing something for the dislocation of the earthquake and the fire, it is to-day. From the time when Dennis Kearney organized the working men in an attack on Chinese immigration, San Francisco has been emphatically a trade union city. And this, of course, is a factor of the first moment in stimulating anti-Asiatic sentiment. The American, at the best of times, has all too little of the responsible, protective, elder-brotherly feeling for men of another race and color than his own. He has none at all when he sees in the alien an economic competitor. The stark, insensate prejudice

of the Southerner's attitude towards the negro is not merely reproduced in the Californian's attitude towards Asiatics, but is immeasurably intensified by his horror of being degraded to the economic level of his thrifty and unsparing rival. The interplay of or ganized trade unionism, jealously guarding its monopoly of labor against all comers, of an irrepressible racial antagonism, and of a determination, that grows each year more intensely fixed, to preserve America as a white man's, or, at any rate, as a white and black man's, country, has made the Pacific Coast, often against its immediate interests, a hot-bed of anti-Orientalism. Often against its immediate interests I say, because even a detached looker-on would have some difficulty in striking a true balance between the minor expediencies of the matter. The Asiatics in California, except in the early gold-mining days, have never really competed with the white man. Their labor has been almost exclusively given to pursuits disdained by the "superior" race, and for that labor they have always exacted the highest market price. It is a matter of record that when wages in California fell below fifteen dollars a month, Chinese immigration not only ceased but the tide turned the other way. But for their deft fingers and faithful assiduity, the Pacific Coast could never either industrially or agriculturally have reached even its present height of material development. The Chinese built the Panama railway just as sooner or later they will have to be called in to build the Panama canal. It was their labor that brought the first trans-continental line to San Francisco. In ditch-work and dam-work, in all the rougher forms of reclamation and development, their equals for efficiency and persistence cannot be found. They have been the mainstay of the Californian farmer and horticulturist. In picking and pack

ing fruit, in the vineyards, in the fish canneries, as laundrymen, as cooks and household servants, and as farmhands they have provided not only the best supply of labor that any part of America has ever had at its disposal, but better than could be obtained anywhere else. The European workers who pour in through the Atlantic ports rarely reach the Pacific, and Californians see all round them vast areas of territory lying uncleared and unimproved and works of development waiting to be done that neither native Americans nor white immigrants have any longer the patience to undertake. It is as true to-day as it ever has been that if the derelict lands are to be opened up with any expedition and on any system it can only be by Asiatic labor. The business leaders of the Pacific Coast know this, and if they were allowed to would not merely proclaim it, but act upon it. Only a few months ago the Portland Chamber of Commerce officially suggested that Chinese coolies should be admitted into the United States for the next ten years on condition that their numbers never exceeded one-tenth of one per cent. of the total population. But no such proposal stands any chance of adoption by the Californian masses, still less by the Californian politicians. The very virtues of Asiatics are made the head and front of the indictment against them. That they are never drunken and rarely disorderly, that half their earnings are remitted home, that they go to America merely to work, and do not become a charge on the local treasury or beg in the streets of San Francisco, or meddle with politics, or concern themselves in any way with governmental or religious institutions and strifes, but lead a separate, innocuous existence, and leave the country when they have hoarded enough to provide for the remainder of their days-all this, which some people

would regard as a conspicuous merit, is twisted by the Californians into a crime against American civilization. I quite agree that there is much to be said on the other side, and that the question is not one to be settled on merely utilitarian grounds. The unrestricted immigration of Asiatics means the planting in California of a vast alien colony, exclusive, inscrutable, unassimilative, bound together in an offensive and defensive organization, with fewer wants and a lower standard of living than their neighbors. maintaining intact their peculiar customs and characteristics, morals and ideals of home and family life, with neither the wish nor the capacity to amalgamate or even conform with the civilization upon which they have intruded, and gradually, by the mere pressure of numbers, undermining the very foundation of the American working-man's well-being. To such a visitation California may well object; from such a prospect she may well shrink. Her industries may be retarded, her crops go unharvested, the yield of her vineyards and fruit-farms may rot away through sheer lack of the indispensable labor, her whole progress may be checked-these are but the passing exigencies of a day. What she has to safeguard is the future and the distinctiveness of her race and civilization, and in her passionate and unalterable conviction they cannot be protected unless the free ingress of Orientals is restricted and regulated.

The objections I have roughly summarized apply more or less to all Asiatics alike, but to the Chinese with redoubled force. They came to California without their women-folk-and we have learned in South Africa what that means and under a system of contracts to Chinese task masters that had all the essentials of slavery; and in the heart of San Francisco they

erected the scandal of Chinatown. Arguments from morality and economics, acting on an instinctive racial antipathy and on a somewhat worthier resolve to preserve the fundamentals of the American social structure, soon swelled the agitation against them flood-high. That agitation converted the country, or at least convinced it that the matter was one to be settled as California wished. The first result was that series of Chinese Exclusion Laws, each one more stringent than its predecessors, which began in 1880, and now in their totality virtually prohibit the immigration of Chinese coolies. And here it is important to note that the Chinese were singled out as the victims of American anti-Orientalism, not because they were more objectionable than the Japanese or Koreans except in a few minor particulars, but simply because they were the only Asiatics of whom Americans at that time had any experience. The statesmanship of the Pacific Coast was not very provident. It thought it had settled the whole question by barring out Chinese laborers. It did not foresee that when Chinese immigration was stopped Japanese and Korean immigration would set in, and would, in time, reproduce essentially the same conditions over again. Had the Californians perceived this, the laws excluding the Chinese would have been laws excluding all Asiatics. From their point of view it makes no material difference whether their visitors come from Yokohama, Seoul, or HongKong. The same racial and economic, if not precisely the same moral, objections hold equally good for them all.

The second result of American antiOrientalism was that the Chinese Exclusion Laws, already sufficiently severe, were administered with an offensive incivility that fell little short of downright barbarism; and this led some fifteen months ago to a piquant

international clash. The immigration officers at San Francisco had got into the way of treating the entire Chinese people as a nation of coolie laborers. Both Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft admitted as much. "Chinese merchants and students," said the former, "of high standing and character are subjected to an examination of such an inquisitorial, humiliating, insulting, and physically uncomfortable character as to discourage altogether their advent among us." The President officially declared that "we have come short of our duty to the people of China." A Chinese gentleman arriving at San Francisco was made to herd with coolies in a common shed while his credentials were being examined. He was unable to communicate with his friends; he was subjected to the personal indignity of being overhauled by the immigration officers; he was not allowed to retain a lawyer to protect his interests, and from an adverse decision of the port authorities there was no possibility of appeal. Chinese mandarins, officials, statesmen, envoys, men of letters, students, travellers, and merchants were all being systematically treated with every circumstance of discourtesy and contempt. China complained and America jeered, and at last the Chinese people took the matter up on their own account. With a shrewd insight into the American character they organized, in the summer of 1905, a boycott of American goods. The great merchants at the treaty ports, working through the machinery of the trade guilds, developed the movement with a rapidity and effectiveness that seemed almost to argue a new sense of cohesion in China's disjointed millions. The American flour trade was immediately paralyzed; the export of American cottons and textiles fell off by more than a million dollars; and in a very brief time the Americans found not only a trade of £20,000,000 a year in

jeopardy, but the moral authority which had accrued to them as the only great Power whose interests in the Far East were in no way political or territorial, and whose policy had been uniformly humane and sympathetic, destroyed.

But the moral of that incident has been thrown away, and its clear warning that Americans would some day have to rearrange their relations with Asia on a basis of better manners, more justice, more reciprocity, and less prejudice has been disregarded. The Pacific Coast, and therefore the whole of the United States, is now inviting at the hands of the Japanese a far sharper form of retaliation and one incomparably more telling both politically and commercially than any it is as yet in the power of China to inflict. A quarter of a century ago there were probaby not more than a hundred Japanese in California. To-day there are over 40,000. Of these some 10,000 live in San Francisco and the rest are scattered through the State as agriculturists, farm-hands, market gardeners, domestic servants, and ordinary laborers. They own and cultivate over 60,000 acres, mostly in the form of small twenty-acre lots, though some of them have taken to American extensive farming on a large scale. Trained on the grudging soil of Nippon, their labor extracts from the bountiful valleys and hill sides of California a yield that is the envy of their haphazard American competitor. As fruit and vegetable growers they excel, and the neatness and finish of their farms are a standing reproach to the unkempt wastefulness of their white neighbors. Whether in town or country they are a cheery, industrious, peaceable set of men, living simply and economically, but without a trace of Chinese squalor, supporting their own churches, both Christian and Buddhist. publishing nearly a dozen daily, weekly, and

monthly periodicals in their own tongue, and furnishing the unskilled labor of which neither the railways nor the farmers can ever have enough. In the economic and industrial fabric of California they have taken, in short, the place once held by the Chinese. And in doing so they have exposed themselves to the same hostility based on very much the same arguments. If their standard of living is higher than the Chinese, and their morals better, their competition is equally effective, they remain just as alien to the spirit of American civilization, they are no less a community within a community. and their separateness and clannishness must for ever bar their absorption into the main stream of American life. Ever since, in the nineties, they began to flock over in thousands instead of scores, the feeling against them has gathered a more than proportionate vehemence. California, in fact, may already be said to have made up her mind that the Japanese coolie and artisan must be placed under the ban. A Japanese and Korean Exclusion League has been formed, and for some years past has been holding a pistol to the heads of the Californian Senators at Washington. We may expect before long to find all the weapons of popular agitation and political pressure that were employed against the Chinese, directed with equal animosity and recklessness against the Japanese. Already it is threatened that unless the next Republican national convention formally agrees to advocate the prohibition of coolie immigration from Japan, all the States on the Pacific Coast, and half the Rocky Mountain States, will swing over to the Democratic side. Already it has been proposed in Congress to bring the Japanese within the scope of the Chinese Exclusion Laws, and already there is talk in San Francisco, though nothing, I hope, more than talk, of "Jim Crow"