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tion, which would be repugnant to American institutions and would destroy the idea of equality. It is, therefore, a question of preserving California as a white man's country, upholding American standards and civilization, or abandoning it to an alien people capable, in this fierce competition, of either exterminating the whites or of reducing them to a hopelessly lower economic, social and political plane. The contest would be a human machine against a human machine, without any consideration for the spiritual, intellectual and political betterment of humanity. A free government such as ours depends upon the intelligence, patriotism and prosperity of the people. It would be fatal to impoverish and destroy the men and women on whom we depend.

In this view, we have to eliminate any question of increased production, or pride in statistical tables of great wealth. They are of minor importance. It is the proper distribution of wealth among the people that concerns us most. Amicable relations with a foreign government must yield to a proper regard for the welfare of our own people. The alien land act might well be described as an act of self-preservation.

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NEGATIVE DISCUSSION

World's Work. 14:9373-6. September, 1907

Mongolian as a Workingman.

Woods Hutchinson

Having lived along the Pacific Coast from Vancouver Island to Los Angeles for nearly seven years, I have had time enough to observe the situation without remaining in any one place long enough to absorb local prejudices. Being neither a day-laborer nor an employer of labor, my point of view has not been obscured by personal interest.

First of all, no class on the Pacific Coast desires an unlimited, or even a very large, immigration of Mongolians, whether coolies or merchants, Chinese, Japanese, or Koreans. The people want to keep this Coast a white man's country. Many of us are keenly alive to the complications arising from the permanent presence of an inferior race with which it is not suitable to intermarry. Yet in these seven years I have found the consensus of intelligent opinion in the community—farmers, merchants, professional men, lumbermen, housewives, in fact all grades and conditions of people except the labor unions, the "hoodlums," and the politicians and editors who truckle to such classesstrongly in favor of a limited Mongolian immigration.

They believe that the Chinese and the Japanese-up to, say, a quarter or a half a million-would be of enormous commercial value to the Coast and of little or no social or moral disadvantage. They do not say much about it in public, for intelligent opinion goes about in fear of the noisier and more prejudiced expressions and of the newspapers which echo them. Our politicians take their cue from the shoutings of the mob and misrepresent us on this question. A false impression has grown up in the East with regard to the real attitude of Oregon and California toward the Oriental problem.

The considerations that lead many intelligent people to favor Chinese and Japanese immigration are these:

First, there is an utter absence on the Coast of any nativeborn or American white day-laboring class below the artisan

or skilled mechanic. I have never yet met on this coast an American white man who was willing to regard himself as a day-laborer by profession, who expected to pass his life in that capacity. American laborers are too intelligent and too ambitious for that. The native-born men and boys who cultivate our ranches, pick our fruit, build our railroads, and man our lumber crews, are simply "working for a stake." As soon as they have earned one or two hundred dollars, off they go to the mines, the fisheries, the timber and homestead claims, to set up for themselves. They are the finest labor on earth, as long as you can hold them, but the moment they have "made their stake" they leave. A new find at Bullfrog, Tonopah, or Rhyolite will empty the bunk-houses in a week.

There is only a small supply of Italians, Poles, Hungarians, and Russians. These immigrants come by way of New York and stop off along the whole breadth of the continent, so the handful which reaches us is wholly inadequate for our needs.

Moreover, we prefer the Chinese to any of these or to the Mexicans with their dirt, laziness, and stupidity. The Chinaman is the most industrious worker that walks the earth in human form. He doesn't seem to know how to get tired. All you need to do is to show him what he has to do, and set him at it; he will stay by it as long as he can see to work, seven days out of the week. There is something positively uncanny about his affection for work. No class of white men will work with the unremitting persistency of the Chinese. The Japanese is more human. He will quiet of his own accord occasionally, but he also is a tireless, cheerful worker.

Apart from these merely commercial or mechanical virtues, both Japanese and Chinese have an excellent personal reputation all up and down the Coast. Not only are they honest and industrious, but they are kindly, cheerful, grateful for good treatment, devoted to the children of the families in which they work, faithful to their friends, kind to their families, to one another, and to everyone in trouble. They give liberally, not only to their own poor, but to Christian missions and charities. "As fat as a Chinaman's horse" has passed into a proverb. The dislike of them is racial and class, not personal.

The terrors of the "Yellow Peril" exist chiefly in the imaginations of walking delegates and Congressmen. “Chinese cheap labor" has not to date "ruined" any white man, for the simple reason that it does not compete with him. It fills a gap which no white man or woman on the Pacific Coast is willing to fill, except temporarily under stress of circumstance. It is not a question of wages. The fact of the matter is that we cannot get, at any price, more than half the white labor that we need here now to build and keep in repair our railroads, man our mines, work our farms, pick our fruit, our hops, our nuts, grow our vegetables, and do our household work. A good general servant in California for instance, commands from $30 to $40 a month, with the washing "put out," and few are to be had at that price.

To speak of "Chinese cheap labor" provokes a smile on the Coast, for the Chinese laborer gets at least as high a wage as the white man of the same class, and usually a little higher on account of his superior industry, honesty, and trustworthiness. Chinese workingmen earn from $2 to $4 a day in the orchards, the mines, and the canneries, while a fair Chinese servant gets $40 a month and board, and a good cook or steward receives from $50 to $100. One such cook, with a helper, will provide meals in a lumber or mining camp for forty or fifty

men.

Nor does the great mass of Japanese interfere with any class of white labor. Certain of them are more enterprising and versatile, however, and are beginning to enter the lower grades of skilled manual labor. Hence their unpopularity with the labor unions, and the recent agitation for their exclusion. The chief trouble with the Japanese is that he is a little too much like ourselves.

The Oriental influence upon our social or political life need give little concern, since both races come here with the fixed intention of returning to the Orient-the Chinese after he has made some money, the Japanese after he has learned some particular thing. They show not the slightest desire to intermarry with the white race, even if this were permitted; they take no more interest in politics or in any form of social life outside of their own colonies and tongs or guilds than so many horses. As to the nameless Oriental vices and diseases about which we hear so much, I think I may be allowed to speak with some positiveness. For two years I was state health officer of Ore

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gon, and one of my first duties was a thorough investigation of the Chinatowns of San Francisco and Portland with reference to the bubonic plague, which was at that time smoldering in the former city. If there was anything in these colonies that I did not see, it was my own fault, as I was always courteously accompanied by Federal, state or municipal officers. When in search of a suspected case of plague, every door which was not promptly opened on demand was smashed in with an axe. In addition, I have been for years keenly interested both in tropical diseases and in the forms assumed by European diseases in Oriental races.

I have no hesitation in saying that neither the Chinese nor the Japanese has a single disease or vice which does not exist among white men, except certain geographical infections like beri-beri, nor is he subject to them in any higher degree than white men of his grade of intelligence. Leprosy, for instance, is no more prevalent among them than it was in Norway and Sweden fifty years ago, and in Scotland and Ireland 150 years ago. More lepers have actually come into the United States from northern Europe than from all Asia, and since the United States Marine Hospital Service began inspecting intending immigrants in Chinese ports, scarcely a single case has entered by any Pacific port. Whatever danger threatened from this disease is already abolished.

The same may be said of any further danger from the bubonic plague. While both Chinese and Japanese suffer severely from tuberculosis, this is little more prevalent among them than among Irish, Scandinavians, Italians, Russians, or Hungarians, and can with equal readiness be absolutely excluded by competent sanitary inspection and quarantine regulations. Diseases peculiar to men are neither more frequent nor more virulent among them than among the white men of the same class. Most cases have been contracted since coming to this country.

The sanitary (or, more properly, insanitary) conditions of Chinatowns are only such as result from overcrowding. The chief difficulty in the way of their complete removal is the shameful opposition of the white owners of the property, many of them pillars of society and of the church, whose enormous revenues from the rookeries are in direct ratio to the number of tenants they can crowd into them. Money greed and the dishonesty of politicians and police who blackmail its vices and

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