Part 12 (1/2)

They are an Island people and the smell of the sea is in their nostrils.

They already control the commerce of the Pacific and their ambition is to increase that commerce by every means in their power.

The colonies they will found in the future, the countries that the swarming millions from j.a.pan will covet and occupy will border the Pacific Ocean, where the s.h.i.+ps that fly the j.a.panese flag will come and go as the couriers of a great commerce binding the colonies of j.a.pan to the mother country.

Where then will they go?

_To South America?_

Yes, to its northern sh.o.r.es bordering the Pacific, to Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, more particularly to Peru. In a very few years, as history runs, there will be an immense j.a.panese population on these Northern Pacific sh.o.r.es of South America. It is not at all unlikely that in less than a century there will be a larger population in South America of the j.a.panese race than now exists in all of j.a.pan. It will be recruited not only from the surplus population of the mother country, but from a rapid reproduction of the j.a.panese among the transplanted population. There will be no race suicide among the j.a.panese. They will stick to the land in these new countries and breed a race as st.u.r.dy as its progenitors. They will never adopt the Anglo-Saxon system of City Congestion and consequent Racial Extinction.

_Will they go to Mexico?_

Yes, they will go to Mexico, and the Pacific Coast region of Mexico will be another breeding ground for this hardy and virile race, where likewise they will be tillers of the soil and a people hardened and strengthened by constant contact with Mother Earth.

More than that, the Mexicans will speedily be taught, if they require the lesson, that if they harm a hair in the head of a j.a.panese, punishment and retribution will be sure, swift, and severe. They will live at peace with the j.a.panese for that reason. It is the only way to have peace in Mexico, and j.a.pan is strong enough to enforce peace and the security of the lives and property of all her people that way.

And because they will do that, they will eventually control and dominate Mexico, in a good deal the same way that England dominates India. Whenever they do that, they will protect not only their own people and their property, but that of all other peoples as well, and everybody will be as safe in Mexico as in j.a.pan. But the waters that now run to waste in the Pacific Ocean, on the west coast of Mexico, will be harnessed to irrigate the orchards and gardens of the j.a.panese and an Asiatic and not a Caucasian race will possess Mexico.

”_Why?_” some one asks.

For the very simple reason that the j.a.panese will occupy Mexico because they want to reclaim and cultivate its waste lands, and not speculate in them or exploit somebody else who will cultivate them.

Already the j.a.panese are as laborers cultivating large areas owned by American Capitalists in the delta of the Colorado River. That will not last. The j.a.panese will before very long organize a.s.sociations among themselves and acquire and own the land or some other land which they can own and cultivate for themselves. There is no alien land law in Mexico that will prevent that and there will be none. The j.a.panese will see to that.

Neither will there ever be any long continued peace or security for life or property in Mexico until either j.a.pan or the United States enforces it. If we do not, they will. _That is as certain as fate._

And when they undertake the task, dragged into it by some outrage on their own people, shall we stay their hand, and say to them that the Monroe Doctrine applies to Asiatic as well as to European nations?

It is only a matter of time when we will have to face that question with j.a.pan. j.a.pan will no more permit the Mexicans to commit outrages on the j.a.panese than she will permit us to do it. Some idea of the conflicts that race hatred may breed in Mexico will be gained by reading the quotation that follows from ”In Mexico the Land of Unrest,” by Henry Baerlin.

In the preface of that book we find this description of a ”gentle and joyous pa.s.sage at arms” of the Mexicans with the Chinese.

”I fancy that a number of the miscreants who, owing to a mere misunderstanding, ma.s.sacred three hundred Chinamen in Torreon not long since--some were cut into small pieces, some beheaded, some were tied to horses by their queues and dragged along the streets, while others had their arms or legs attached to different horses and were torn asunder, some were stood up naked in the market gardens of the neighborhood and given over as so many targets to the drunken marksmen, thirteen Chinese employees of Yu Hop's General Store were haled into the street and killed with knives, two hundred Chinamen were sheltered in the city gaol, but all their money was appropriated and such articles of clothing as the warders fancied. One brave girl had nine of them concealed, and calmly she denied their presence even when her father had gone out to argue with the mob and had been shot for being on the Chinese side--a number of these miscreants, I fancy, are on other days delightful citizens.”[1]

[Footnote 1: ”The Mexicans are descended, on the one side,” says Mr.

Cunningham Graham, ”from the most bloodthirsty race of Indians that the Spanish Conquerors came across, and on the other side from the very fiercest elements of the Spanish race itself--elements which had just emerged from eight hundred years of warfare with the Moors.”]

Think you that the j.a.panese would submit to that without war? The account of this racial outrage may be overdrawn, but judging from what happened in our own country when the Chinese were being persecuted prior to the Exclusion Act, there is nothing inherently improbable in this account. It is no worse than the Turkish outrages that have often been committed on Christians in Asia Minor or in Europe.

China has submitted to all such outrages because for centuries she has been a nation of peace, but the time is not far distant when she will do so no longer.

With the United States, a nation with a government, in case of race conflict, leading to insult or injury to j.a.panese, we could make amends, or fight, as we chose, and we would probably make amends.

In Mexico, likely at any time to be without a government, as she is now, a conflict with j.a.pan would be very apt to result like the recent differences between the Turks and the English in Egypt. The Land of the Montezumas would become a Protectorate of the Land of Nippon and a part of its Empire Power.

The j.a.panese problem would then be transferred from across the Pacific to across the Rio Grande, and j.a.panese cotton mills at Guaymas would get their cotton from the cotton fields of the Colorado River Valley. They would transport it by water down the Colorado River and across the Gulf of California and develop a great ocean commerce from the territory that is tributary to the Gulf of California. That includes the whole valley of the Colorado River if its transportation facilities were adequately and comprehensively developed, as the j.a.panese would develop it, by lines of j.a.panese steamers running up the Colorado River at least as far as Yuma.

The American Railroads could not strangle j.a.panese compet.i.tion.

CHAPTER VII