BROWN MEN ARE MOST DANGEROUS

To those who have not forgotten the nature and extent of the Chinese invasion, when it threatened to obliterate Caucasian standards of living, and foist an Asiatic civilization upon California, no more alarming statement can be made than the fact that the Japanese is taking the place of the Chinese wherever the two races are brought into competition with each other. If the Chinese whose name is a synonym of all that goes to the making of a hard bargain, cannot keep up in the sordid struggle for Asiatic existence with his half-dwarf neighbor, the extent of the brown peril which threatens us is apparent.

As will be seen by the following article, the witnesses examined by the Industrial Commission were unanimous in saying that Japanese immigration is more dangerous in every way to the American commonwealth than the immigration of the Chinese.

Why, then, should any patriotic citizen be lukewarm in his protest against the far more dangerous serfs from the empire of the Mikado?

Threatened Peaceful Invasion is Worse Than War

Among the witness examined by the Industrial Commission upon the subject of Asiatic immigration, there was a very startling unanimity upon all the essential parts of the problem, although these witnesses were drawn impartially from all the classes that were in possession of reliable information. They were all emphatically of the opinion that Japanese immigration is more dangerous to the community than Chinese, and they were all equally of one mind that the Japanese ought to be excluded, and that the factors that demanded the exclusion of the Chinese were still more operative in respect to their Asiatic cousins.

Thus J.P. Jackson unequivocally says: "I regard this class of laborers as a decidedly greater menace to our white laborers than are the Chinese," and among his reasons he cites the well-known vices of the Chinese as being in every way preferable to the cunning and shrewd craftiness of the Japanese. Far be it from us to underestimate the virulence of the Chinese plague, from which there are now many signs of convalescence, although in San Francisco alone Chinese competition in garment working and other trades still crushes the industrial life of hundreds of American women, to the shame of some few employers who suppose that their own apparent profits constitute the ten commandments of the business world, and perhaps not less to the shame of the consumers who are indifferent to the fetid and opium-reeking atmosphere in which their clothing is manufactured.

Nevertheless, the Chinese evil is slowly abating, and there can be no more remarkable testimony to the reality of the peril that is taking its place than the fact that the Chinese himself--synonym, as he is, of all the faculties that go to the making of a bargain--cannot compete with his Japanese neighbor. To some slight extent, and in certain directions, the Chinese has learned the importance of maintaining prices, while his activities are largely confined to the particular branches of business that he has made peculiarly his own.

THE CHINESE WORSTED.

But these very branches have now been invaded by the Japanese and their rooted determination to underbid has put the Chinese out of business. There are, moreover, many instances in which the Chinese has shown marked and disinterested power of fidelity and a willingness to identify himself with the interests of his employer, but among the Japanese we shall look long before we find any such trait as this. With him the employer is in all cases the teacher, pure and simple--the human text-book that is to be contemptuously thrown upon one side as soon as the desired lesson has been learned.

The position from which they have ousted the white man they will hold just so long as it contains a lesson for them, and they will then summarily quit that employment without one thought of the inconvenience and the discomfort that they may cause. The wages that they demand are exactly attuned to the desideratum of dispossessing the white man, and when that has once been effectively done they will exploit the needs of the employer with a cunning acumen to which the Chinese might aspire in vain. Mr. Jackson has both rhyme and reason upon his side when he says, "I think we have much more to fear from Japan than from China."

As a concise matter of fact the Japanese has no economic conscience, or, if he has any at all, he has left it behind him in Japan. Even there it appears to be quite consistent with the unblushing forgery of trade marks and manufacturers' names, and many another Asiatic device, for which the penitentiary would await the more civilized culprit. The Japanese in America has no sense of duty so far as any American interest is concerned, while the Chinese has in very many instances evolved a very fair imitation of both duty and conscience. It certainly cannot be questioned that in their respective countries the average Chinese is immeasurably the moral superior of the average Japanese.

The verbal promise to pay of the Chinese is worth far more than the stamped bond of the Japanese, while the Chinese conscience is often as conspicuous by its presence as the Japanese conscience is remarkable by its absence.

BATTLEFIELD ETHICS.

The Japanese in America considers himself as engaged in an economic war, and his ethics are those of the battlefield. No one is more pitiless, no one is more unscrupulous, and, it must certainly be added, no one is more noisy in his claim for special and peculiar consideration than the infant child of the world's civilization. An infant child Japan certainly is, from the point of view of civilization, but she is an infant that has incarnated in the adult body of a Shylock already apparently saturated with the automatic chicanery of ages, an infant that is only complaisant so long as it gets its own willful and ungoverned way, so long as it is allowed to set at defiance every canon of international good breeding and of international commercial equity.

In the matter of industry the Japa

nese compares most unfavorably with the Chinese. Whatever the former may be in his own country, in America he becomes distinctly indolent. The comparative number of Japanese out of employment is greater than that of any other class of the community, and this is not due to any inability to get work, but rather to their unwillingness to work regularly, steadily and effectually. Now such a reproach as this has never been brought against the Chinese, whose industry is indeed excessive and competitive in its intensity. The Chinese does, it is true, smoke opium, but he does it secretively, and he rarely allows it to incapacitate him from work.

The Japanese are usually indolent and they frequently drink, incapacity for work being, of course, the result. Their number is so great that when they are employed upon gang work there are always those ready to take the places of the lazy and the drunken ones, and thus we find Mr. Dam saying: "While some are sleeping off the effects of the night's intoxication others always take their places, so that one need not be without any number of them at all times." The Chinese, as we have seen, confines himself to his chosen avocations. The Japanese has a pervasiveness to which the Chinese is a stranger. Nothing comes amiss to him, and the coolie of the country district becomes the shoemaker or the mechanic of the city, as well as its physician, its dentist and its fortune teller. In domestic work particularly the Japanese is ousting the Chinese, because he will work for less; but Mr. Dam tells us that their work is not so satisfactory, because they are less reliable.

NOT GOOD WORKERS.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics for the State of California furnishes us with a most instructive table showing the percentages of the employed and the unemployed for the various nationalities composing the population of the State. We need not reproduce that table, but the conclusions of the Commissioner are especially striking as affording one more comparison between the Chinese and the Japanese. The report says: "The percentage of those employed in gainful occupations who are out of work during a part of the year is lowest among the Chinese, and very high among the Japanese, being exceeded only by the Indians and the Negroes. It would seem that the Chinese, having the largest percentage of the total population at work, while the Japanese, having an equal percentage of the total population at work, are also most persistent in their labor, while the Japanese, having an equal percentage at work, are among the least persistent and are most often out of employment."

Those who have employed Japanese upon a large scale are beginning to be first in their condemnation, and, wherever such employers have drawn comparisons between the Chinese and the Japanese, it is usually to the disadvantage of the latter. Until the year 1903, the Union Pacific Railway utilized Japanese labor to a considerable degree, but they were forced to discontinue, on the ground that while they were lacking in perseverance, in endurance and in steadiness. The Japanese workman considered that four days constituted a working week, and general experience led to the conclusion that five Japanese were equal to four white men. Nor is this purely an American estimate.

The German Nachrichten fur Handel prints a report from its Japanese correspondent to the effect that "the dexterity and industry of the Japanese workman find universal recognition, but his capacity for production amounts at most to two-thirds of that of an European workman. Besides, he possesses peculiarities of character. It often happens that a large number of workmen leave work suddenly without warning, merely to gratify their desire for change." Even the Japanese themselves seem to be aware of this failing; for the Japan Times, writing on the subject of the watch trade and the wages paid therein, remarks that ten American workmen can easily do the work of seventy or eighty Japanese.

WORSE THAN CHINESE.

From whatever source, indeed, we may seek our information, the verdict is invariably the same. The Japanese may profess to despise the Chinese, but they cannot afford to do so, inasmuch as the Chinese is the better man, better morally and better industrially. Chinese vices are few and great, and because those vices are abnormal in America, their weight may perhaps sometimes be overestimated. Like the rest of the world, we

Condone the sins we are inclined to

By damning those we have no mind to.

Most of the Chinese vices are shared also by the Japanese and we do but quote the most authoritative opinion in saying that they are more servile than the Chinese, but less obedient and far less desirable. They have the vices of the Chinese without his virtues, and if they excel him in intelligence and in adaptability, these things are not virtues unless they are virtuously used, and in the case of the Japanese they are used mainly for chicanery, for duplicity and against the interests of the country which they have determined to industrially conquer.

That the intention of California to abate this nuisance is in no way due to the local prejudice of self-interest it is very easy indeed to show by a selection from a very great deal of conclusive evidence collected outside the frontiers of the State.