EACH RACE FOR ITS OWN.
America for Americans, Japan for the Japanese.

It has been imagined by some that it would be impossible to legislate for the exclusion of the Japanese coolie class without arousing great antagonism in the Japanese Government and retaliatory action, which would seriously injure our influence in Eastern Asia and greatly interfere with the extension of our trade in Oriental countries. It may be said that at once that if the exclusion of the Japanese should make Japan the mortal enemy of America, and if thereby our entire influence in Eastern Asia should be destroyed, it would still be necessary to enact the law. Our first duty is to preserve America for the Americans and the white races whom we can assimilate and whose children will have the American standard of life. All other questions, whatever their importance, are subordinate to that.

But in the passage of an exclusion act it is not necessary to wound the national pride of Japan in the least, or to impair the traditional friendship which was the result of our forcible and entirely unwarranted intrusion on Japanese privacy half a century ago. It is unnecessary in so doing to lose a dollar's worth of trade which we might otherwise possess. No one can dispute the high intellectual qualities of the Japanese, their practical wisdom, their intense patriotism or their national vigor. It is not necessary, even, for us to dispute the claim which the Japanese would doubtless make that their civilization is greatly superior to our own. Let it go at that. It is sufficient to say that their civilization is radically different from ours; that it is a civilization which, whether better or worse, involves conditions of life for the working class and small merchants which our working people will not willingly endure, and that the best interests of both peoples demand that each shall be permitted to develop its own civilization, on its own soil, unimpeded by the intrusion of large masses of a different race, with different ideals and wholly different habits of life.

Historically that is the exact position of the Japanese. Everybody knows that for ages they maintained exclusion laws compared with which any which we should enact would be mere trifling with the subject. Yielding to the superior force of Commodore Perry and his successors of our own and other nations the Japanese astutely adopted the policy of admitting the people of the West just so far and just so long as should be necessary for them to acquire such portions of our civilization as they say occasion to use. When that end is accomplished they stop short. They borrowed our military and naval instructors, our machinists and our civil engineer just so long as was required to teach their own people and no longer. As fast as we teach them our arts--and never were pupils more diligent and successful--our instructors are turned out neck and crop, and the knowledge which they have imparted is employed to wrest from us not only their own markets, which we had confidently assumed that we could hold, but all other Oriental markets. And they will soon be invading the markets of the West with products which, whether as good as our own or not, will sell because they are cheaper than ours. Virtually, there is no opening for any American in Japan. There never will be such openings. Perhaps there ought not to be, for Japanese are entitled to Japan, just as Americans are entitled to America, and there should be, and probably will be, no difficulty in making friendly arrangements with Japan which shall recognize both facts.