EDITORIAL
Life, Liberty And The Pursuit Of Happiness

The one oasis in the great document upon which the world's most perfect democracy was founded is the paragraph which guarantees to every citizen Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

After more than 150 years that verdant spot withers under the blistering fire of hate and unrest enveloping a world at war.

With the evacuation of the American-born Japanese, America's reputation for justice and equality no longer glistens. There is danger of our vaunted patriotism becoming the shield of unscrupulous and thoughtless persons, urged only by the flames of racial prejudice.

Many American-born Japanese are serving in the United States Army as volunteers or inductees. None has been more generous in the purchase of Defense Bonds than they. They are active in Red Cross work. They are the only exception that crime and poverty go hand in hand. We may say or do what we wish: We can no longer boast of justice, when American-born men, women, and children are uprooted from their homes and deprived of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Ancestry! Why not the Germans and Italians given the same treatment as the "yellow Japs?" What of their poverty? It is sickening to see the human vultures trailing every Japanese business, Japanese homes, gloating over their gains.

The record of our Alien Custodians in World War I is the blackest chapter in America's history and bids fair to be repeated in World War II as Japanese are evacuated for the duration.

We shudder to think every man has not his day in court. We shudder when we repeat the words of a Southern governor: "To hell with the Constitution where Negroes are concerned."

We make no brief for Japanese. Rather we would make a brief for the only sun that gave us a ray of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Stoically the Japanese, watch the guarantees of our Constitution fall in the wastebasket. And what do they see?

Our boys fighting on foreign soil, sometimes 24 hours a day through a veritable hell in which death lurks on every side and threatens from the skies, other tens of thousands of Americans, safe in their home cities, refusing to work to produce the arms the boys at the front so desperately need. These are sabotaging the war effort, for various personal, selfish reasons in some cases, following blindly and for some reason fearfully the dictates of bullying, self-seeking labor leaders in others.