necessities are the sole hindrance to the cleansing of these "Oriental plague-spots."

The Chinese contribute to the situation simply by their patient submission to overcrowding and their willingness to pay rent for space in which a white man would suffocate. Contrary to popular impression, they are not dirty in their personal habits. I have physically examined scores of Chinese and Japanese, and they strip cleaner than any European immigrants of their class. Their bedrooms are neatly kept and their kitchens are cleaner than those of the average restaurant. In fact, they must be clean, as a matter of stern survival necessity. I have frequently seen inside rooms fifteen feet square, without windows or airshafts, their only opening being a door into a dark, narrow passage, in which cooked, ate, and slept ten to twelve Chinese; and yet there was little or no offensive odor.

Chinese and Japanese servants are models of neatness and cleanliness and usually report for duty in white duck jackets. They keep both kitchens and bedrooms far cleaner than the average foreign-born hired girl.

Any Chinatown can be kept in good sanitary condition, merely by a little energetic and honest health-policing and by enforcing the building and lodging-house laws already in existence. Make the owners of the property pay a special license-tax out of their enormous rentals, use this to provide a special sanitary inspector, and the thing is done. Chinese stand in holy fear of the law and its officers, and one or two lessons would be enough. They take very kindly to overcrowding; if permitted they will take a room or floor, "split" it into two stories, if the ceilings are more than twelve feet high, by putting in an extra floor six feet above the original one. If the ceiling is lower, they build tiers of bunks clear to the top, with perhaps a gallery four feet below it. These quarters are then sublet to a dozen or a score of sub-tenants. But a few arrests and a tearing out of these "improvements" would soon stop all this. They do not love overcrowding and dirt for their own sake, but merely put up with them to save money; the rooms of the more intelligent and wealthy Chinese are often light, airy, and spotlessly clean.

Many disgusting things are to be seen in our Chinatowns, but nothing that cannot be matched in any city slum or "tenderloin." The worst "joints" are those which are run for the

10.30 — 11 Try Suit.

benefit of white visitors and white patrons. We pay too high a compliment to Chinese intelligence when we imagine that he can devise anything more ingenious or complicated in the way of vice than we. He gambles, of course, but fan-tan is his only substitute for the race-course and Wall Street. In the absence of family life, he invents all sorts of ingenious deviltry—just like New York or London clubmen. He smokes a good deal of opium and probably shortens his life considerably by so doing, but for some strange racial reason it seldom makes the abject physical and moral wreck of him that morphine does of the white man. So far as I can learn, only about 50 per cent. of the Chinese and scarcely 20 per cent. of the Japanese "hit the pipe" at all. Of these probably not more than a third do so to excess, and even they "carry it" surprisingly well. Unless thoroughly familiar with the symptoms, you might see a Chinese every day and never suspect that he was an opium habitué. Unlike Mark Twain's prospector who "never let his business interfere with his drinking," the Chinese never lets his pipe interfere with his work-until the last few weeks, or months before the end. He smokes only out of business hours, or at the end of his week or month, when he can get a day or two off. It is not a handsome nor attractive vice, and the only whites who are led to indulge in it are of the lowest class.

On the other hand, the great majority of Orientals either abstain from alcohol or take it in strict moderation. There are a few saloons in each Chinatown and they can generally be picked out by the group of white men hanging about the door. Of late, the Japanese is showing little tendency to take kindly to whiskey as a substitute for his native saké (rice brandy). Occasionally he will even take enough to become boisterous and come in contact with the police, which occasions much shaking of heads and wagging of beards over "steins."

Managers of canneries which have to handle promptly and regularly every day of the season large amounts of valuable raw material or have it spoil on their hands, will tell you frankly that they prefer Chinese or Japanese to white labor, because they never get drunk or go on sprees at critical periods and require no holidays or days off.

In fine, while the Chinese and the Japanese have their defects, and the Coast has no desire to "gush" over them or urge them to become citizens, we regard them as a valuable commercial fac

tor, and as a race as free from vice or other drawbacks as can reasonably be expected of mortals.

Literary Digest. 47:67+. July 12, 1913

California's Hustling Japanese

You can not hire white men in California to wade through the tule dust in the Sacramento and San Joaquin deltas and thin onions, dig potatoes and onions, harvest beans, and cut asparagus, with a temperature of about 120 degrees in the shade or 130 in the sun. Tule dust is an acrid powder that is about as pleasant to inhale as sulfur fumes. To pull your feet through it is like dragging leaden weights.

The white man will drive a sulky plow or cultivator where it is possible to drive them, he will man the gasoline tractors and other big machinery, but he will not toil on foot under that scorching sun between the rows of growing things that must be cultivated and dug. Nor will he pick raisins and grapes and berries on the big farms that lie outside the delta. Nor yet will he band with his kind in nomadic groups and be available here, there, and everywhere for the harvesting.

The white man simply refused to fill this economic vacuum. The Oriental yielded to the magnetic influence and was drawn into it. Now that he is in and is regarded by high and low authorities as undesirable, the vexing problem is-how to get him out.

Here is the way the situation sizes up to J. P. Irish, Jr., of the Middle River Experiment Farm, who is also on the staff of Secretary Houston, of the United States Department of Agriculture:

Just so long as truck farming is carried on in California on a gigantic scale, and just so long as grapes and fruits are grown on the one-crop basis, we shall be absolutely dependent upon Oriental labor. If we were to drive every Jap, Chinaman, and Hindu out of the State the beet-sugar industry would instantly cease. So would a great section of all our agriculture stop with a bang. We have developed our agriculture in recent years on the basis of a big nomadic population of labor which exists by means of short-term jobs. We are farming on a basis of an immediately available supply of nomadic labor. The

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nomadic white labor that can be recruited is utterly worthless; wherefore we are prest by necessity to depend upon the Japa

nese.

We started out with the Chinese, and he was the best type of laborer we ever had. His habits were his own; his vices were his own. He minded his own business. But a howl was raised against him and the fear grew that the country would be swamped by pigtails. Hence the Exclusion Act.

We shut the Chinese out, which created the opportunity for the Japanese invasion. The Jap rushed in to fill the demand. Where the Chinaman was complacent and passive the Jap has become stubborn and recalcitrant. He demanded and got a passport system. He resisted the pressure against him every inch of the way. But with all his stubbornness and his persistence in coming in, there were not enough of him. Wherefore the Hindu, who from the point of efficiency is less desirable than either the Chinaman or the Jap. The Hindu came not because he could furnish as good labor as the Chinaman or Japanese, but simply because he was nomadic.

Until the landholding in California and other Pacific coast states similarly situated reduce themselves to a point where a man and his family can handle a sub-division, we are going to be ridden and bothered and vexed by these nomadic hordes from the Orient. In my opinion it would have been a great deal better if California had kept on taking the Chinamen until the density of population automatically excluded them.

People here are counting now on throwing open our door to Southern Europe. They expect an inpouring of field laborers. But such has not been the history of immigration from that section. The masses attach themselves to the cities and only a scattered few seek the country. This is not so true of the Portuguese as of the other peoples of Southern Europe, but the Portuguese are comparatively limited in number.

The great cry in California has been that the Japanese are taking the white men's jobs. But that has been a false cry so far as the actual job is concerned. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the white man would not have the Oriental's job as a gift, with a bonus thrown in for extra inducement. Nor will the American negro take it. Several years ago a big planter of Fresno County brought a trainload of colored men to California to work in his fields. They remained on the job less

than a week, and inside of a fortnight, so the report goes, the entire North Carolina shipment was shooting craps or shining shoes or driving ice-wagons in the city of Fresno.

Annals of the American Academy. 34: 80-5. September, 1909

Moral and Social Interests Involved in Restricting Oriental Immigration. Thomas L. Eliot

The one undeniable fact which seems to be emerging is that a certain growing number of Orientals is to be on our shores, partly floating, and partly to stay. It is almost equally certain that exclusion is frankly impossible, deportation impracticable, and the lines of restriction are more and more difficult to define. Others will discuss what may and ought to be done in order to regulate the quantity and quality of the immigration. No doubt careful legislation is necessary both east and west, and in the west, at least, labor immigration should be made the subject of more and more careful treaties and comities with China and Japan. But in the outcome, there will be an accumulation of these peoples, determined to be here by economic principles, and attaching themselves to the soil according to the industrial demands of city and country life. To the present writer it seems a fairly open question whether the ratio of Orientals to the rest of the white population will increase. Except for limited areas, there are with us on this coast no such conditions historically and economically as in the Hawaiian Islands-that is a problem to itself. A few checks and balances added to the present restriction laws ought to suffice for the maintenance of the present ratio on the basis of the entire coast. At the same time the quality of the immigration might be advanced.

The real problem lies with the hosts rather than the guests; as a problem of resourcefulness, adaptation and character. Shall these immigrants be antagonized, solidified into a caste, driven in upon themselves, compelled by our very treatment of them to herd vilely, and live viciously, or shall there grow up among us in the interest of moral and social sanity a determination to minimize crass race-prejudice, to dissipate the superstitions and ignorances of both whites and non-whites, and to set up assimilating processes as far as possible along the levels of individual merit and higher efficiencies? Shall we foster the very