by the "managers" of political parties, and materially help lowering the level of public life. They can be handled without trouble by employers and captains of industry, and are pounced upon by capitalists to be exploited as tools in the breaking of strikes. They thus militate against the effectiveness of workingmen's associations. They spoil the labor market and demoralize the proletariat class. In all respects they embody an enormous drag and dead weight upon America's advance in civilization, democracy, and efficiency.16

Such is the raw material that the United States is eager to wash, scrape, chisel and polish, to assimilate, to manufacture 100 per cent Americans of. If these specimens of humanity be worth a nation's spending millions on, how can the unprejudiced mind be indifferent to the potentialities of those other human beings of the same socio-economic standing that come from across the Pacific? Does hunger affect the muscular organism and the nervous system of men and women differently in the East and the West? Is primitive agriculture the parent of worse poverty and lower standard of material existence in Asia than in Europe? Are the illiteracy and superstition of the white cultivators better adapted to the democratic institutions and labor organization of republican America than those of their yellow and brown peers? Or are the social and moral values of American life likely to deteriorate less through the influx of Occidental medievalism, nescience, boorishness and serfdom than through that of the Oriental? Young Asia wonders as to how it is possible for the brain of America to make a choice between Europe and Asia "under the same conditions of temperature and pressure."

VI. PERSECUTION OF ASIANS IN AMERICA

No new objection can be urged against Asian immigrants from the viewpoint of labor, sanitation, morals, or culture in addition to what is valid against the "new immigration." Intellectually, economically, and politically, the American16 Roberts: p. 295.

izability of the unskilled laborers from Asia is on a par with, not a whit less than, that of those from Europe. The "pre-industrial" life with its medieval hygiene and civics does not qualify the Slav or the Latin for the duties of the American citizen in peace and war to a far greater extent than it does the Chinese, Japanese, and Hindu immigrants. As a matter of fact it need be admitted in all fairness that the prejudice of "Americans" against the "new immigration" is really as strong as against the Oriental. Emotionally apeaking, it could not be otherwise.

But it is very remarkable that under the same "stimulus," viz., an equally keen anti-foreign race-feeling, the people as well as the government of the United States have "reacted" differently to the two groups of foreigners. The differential treatment of the Asian and the European immigrants in America is a striking fact of considerable importanc to students of behavioristic social psychology.

On the one hand, the patriotic Americanizers have been trying their best to abolish the "race lines," the "little Italy's," the "little Hungary's," etc., from their cities. They are thoroughly convinced, as they should be, that these "immigrant colonies," these clan-communities, these towns within towns, present the greatest hindrances to Americanization by perpetuating Old World traditions, customs and ways of thinking. Rightly, therefore, are they determined to do away with the segregations as far as practicable in order to assimilate the "new men, strange faces, other minds" from Europe. On the other hand, American behavior towards Asian immigrants has been the very antithesis of this attitude. The only method directly calculated to prevent fusion, amalgamation or even assimilation has been pursued in the treatment of Orientals. It is a story of systematic ostracism, localization, persecution and torture from beginning to end. Young Asia has at last been forced to realize, like the Jew in medieval Europe, that in this land of the free "sufferance is the badge of all our tribe."

The people of India have few specific grievances against America. On the whole, the treatment of Hindus in the

United States has not been unsympathetic. And the antiHindu animosity of American laborers could not rise to a tragic intensity, because the Hindu labor movement was too short-lived and small in bulk to grow into a "nuisance." As Hindus have no government and flag of their own to protect their interests and sense of the dignity of man, the United States had no trouble in managing the situation. The American public turned a deaf ear to the half a dozen feeble protests from Hindu leaders in the States. The insolent conduct of the immigration officers at the ports, who make it a point to suspect and harass Hindu merchants, students, and travellers as laborers or "public charges" in posse, continues however to be a source of Young Asia's chagrin against America.

The first anti-Japanese propaganda was formally started in 1900, i.e., within about fifteen years of immigration from Japan. In 1905 Japanese had less than 100 children of school-going age scattered in different wards of San Francisco. But the School Board ordered them to be segregated in a separate Japanese school. The same year the State Legislature of California declared the marriage of whites with Mongolians (i.e., Japanese and Chinese) illegal and void. The "school problem" and the problem of miscegenation gradually led to the formation of the Asiatic Exclusion League. It was directed solely against Japan, for Chinese exclusion had already been legislated in 1904, and the Hindu labor-movement had hardly begun. The "gentlemen's agreement" of 1907 finally excluded Japanese laborers from America. Since then California and Arizona have passed alien land laws (1913). These are discriminative exclusively against Japan. According to these laws. leases of agricultural land by other aliens (i.e., those not eligible to citizenship, e.g., Japanese) are limited to three years, and ownership to the extent provided by existing treaties. The injustice of these laws would be apparent from the fact that subjects of the United States are accorded the same rights as other aliens by the land laws of Japan.1

17 Mills: pp. 197-226, Gulick: The American Japanese Problem, 336-339.

use of gymnasiums, Japanese have been

During all this period Japanese have submitted to humiliating treatment18 in restaurants, lodging houses, hotels, moving picture shows, and theatres. Even the Y. M. C. A. has not hesitated to deny them the swimming tanks, athletic fields, etc. excluded from fraternal orders and trade unions. They have not been allowed to employ white women as help. Members of the Japanese consulate have been compelled to leave the residences of their own liking because Americans of the neighbourhood prevented the grocery stores from supplying the "Jap" with provisions on threats of boycott. Added to these the unnoticed and unpunished assaults on Japanese in the streets of American cities, and the indignities suffered by high class Japanese on board American ships and at the ports of landing. After all this comprehensive de-Americanizing of "Mr. Jap" the intellectuals of America dare declare: "Orientals are unassimilable!"

VII. ANTI-CHINESE "POGROMS" OF THE UNITED STATES (1855-1905)

As Chinese immigration was the oldest and most voluminous of the labor-movement from Asia, the anti-Chinese antipathy of America was the most intense and monstrous. In fact, Japanese inherited the anti-Chinese prejudice, and Hindus the anti-Japanese in the chronological order of their arrival; as, in the psychology of America labor, the last immigrant is the worst. Japanese came to America about three years after the first Chinese exclusion law (1882) had been passed, and Hindus reached the Pacific Coast about the time when the anti-Japanese movement was finally drawing to a head (1905–1907).

In 1851, i.e., three years after the discovery of gold in Sacramento Valley there were about 25,000 Chinese in California. They were hailed by the Governor as "one of the most worthy of our newly adopted citizens." But in 1855 the Foreign Miner's License Tax was passed to push Chinese out of the mining fields. Since then for a whole 18 Steiner: pp. 46, 81-83.

half century the popular and governmental (state as well as federal) attitude of America towards Chinese was one of unvarnished iniquity and hypocrisy, as Prof. A. C. Coolidge admits in The United States as a World Power.19

Chinese had to pay special capitation tax, special police tax, special fishing license. In addition to this discriminative legislation the Chinese government had to accept in 1868 some of the objectionable terms of the Burlingame treaty (which, however, was, on the whole, the only decent piece of transaction between America and China down to 1905). By this document China agreed to the denial of American citizenship to persons of the Chinese race. Nor is this all. The ballot was forbidden to Chinese living in America. Schools were closed against them. They were not allowed to give evidence on the witness stand even in cases affecting their own property. They suffered open torture in public places and residential quarters. In normal times it was "mob-law" that governed their person and property. The dictates of American demagogues created veritable reign of terror for them. By 1876 the persecution of Chinese had become so chronic that the Six Companies at San Francisco had to lodge formal complaints to the proper authorities against the assaults and atrocities of Americans. 20

In 1880 an American commission was forced on the imperial government at Peking. By hook or by crook it compelled China to invest the United States with right and authority to modify the Burlingame treaty against Chinese interests, so that Americans might have the legal freedom to "regulate, limit or suspend Chinese immigration" at their own convenience. The first Chinese exclusion bill followed hard upon this in 1882. The American public was not to be satisfied yet. Violent outrages continued to be perpetrated on innocent Chinese men, women and children in the Western States. In 1885 and 1886 Chinese

19 Pages 335-337, 356; Foster: American Diplomacy in the Orient, pp. 300, 301, 306.

20 M. Coolidge: pp 69–82, 129, 255–277.