The Real Yellow Peril
I
IN the summer of 1911, my duties as Times correspondent took me to the Baltic. On a fine morning in July, I found myself in the neighborhood of Riga, walking among the pine trees that grow to the edge of the sand at the popular sea-bathing resort of Dubbeln. Riga, be it observed, boasts of another flourishing watering-place which rejoices in the name of Edinbourg, and is in hereditary rivalry with Dubbeln; but the satisfaction which a wandering Englishman may derive from the saving grace of those names in partibus infidelium is of the gentle, melancholy kind which comes from the contemplation of departed greatness. Inevitably one’s mind goes back to the days of our sturdy merchant adventurers, when England not only dominated the commerce of the White Sea and the Baltic, but pushed her farflung trade lines through Moscow to the shores of the Black Sea and the Caspian. Dubbeln and Edinbourg were originally private estates and summer resorts, created by an Irishman and a Scot, respectively, as places preferable on summer evenings to the narrow, stuffy streets of the old Hanseatic town. To-day, the German and the Dutchman, with their wives and families, fill the suburban villas and hotels of all that region, and bathe noisily behind the curiously ineffective screens which stretch along the water’s edge.
I was reflecting, sadly enough, on the archaic traditions which make the British Board of Trade and Foreign Office so persistently incapable of adapting our national trade interests to their rapidly changing environments, and wondering why the German’s intelligent coördination of financial and industrial resources should be beyond the modern Anglo-Saxon’s economic capacity, when suddenly there emerged on the path in front of me, from the garden gate of a villa among the pines, two thick-set men, clad in blue, each carrying a heavy bundle on his back. The sight of them was strangely familiar; at a glance I knew them to be peddlers from Shantung, from China’s Farthest East; but their sudden appearance here — at the uttermost limit of western Europe — seemed so utterly impossible, that for a moment I stood still, half expecting them to fade and disappear among the pines. They came sturdily along, however, with the shuffling gait habitual to Chinese burden-bearers of the hill countries, and were about to enter the garden gate of the next villa, when I stopped them and asked, in their own tongue, what business brought them to this place, so far from their honorable home.
Talk of British phlegm! There is nothing in the world to compare with the perfectly natural sangfroid, the imperturbable calm of the Chinese race. Neither honest face showed the slightest sign of surprise at being thus addressed. One man, in fact, proceeded stolidly up the path to deposit his pack by the doorstep, leaving the other to answer the foreigner’s questions. Their trade, he informed me, was a peddler’s business in Shantung silks and pongees; for twelve years they had tramped the country northwards and west, from Moscow, their base of supplies. It was a good trade, he said, though even the cheapest inns were very expensive, and many Russians were very deficient in reasonableness, especially the excise officers; and to travel at night was dangerous, because so many men were drunken after dark, and then violent. They were working for a hong manager, getting a small share in the annual profits. Neither of them had been home in all these years, but they hoped to be able to go soon, for their sons in China were now grown men, and they had saved enough to be sure of rice in their old age. Trading in Russia was easy, easier than in China, for the women were free buyers and fond of silk, especially when they could buy it at their doors cheaper than in the shops; but they all keep late hours, and in winter the working-days are very short.
What about the prospect of a parliament in China, I asked, and the condition of affairs at Peking? Shouldering his pack with a jerk, which said plainly that the time for idling was past, he replied, ‘I do not know about these things. All that is mandarin business; we are silk-sellers. The wise dog does not try to catch mice.’ Whereupon we wished each other peace on our respective roads.
But as I stood awhile and watched these sons of Han displaying their wares to a stout lady in a pink peignoir, and heard them bargaining in an evidently serviceable ‘pidgin’ Russian, using the same gestures, the same trade shibboleths which the Shantung silk and fur peddlers have used for centuries in their closely preserved trades, these two lonely figures by the shores of the Baltic seemed to me to be forerunners of the only real Yellow Peril which can possibly threaten the material civilization of the Western World, — a far-flung wave of the great tide of China’s hunger-driven millions, seeking, beyond the borders of the Middle Kingdom, to escape from its ever-present menace of starvation. Behind them I saw the cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand on our horizons of to-day, the cloud of Asia’s intolerable struggle for bare life, unmoved through the long centuries of her splendid isolation by any wind of inspiration or sea-breeze of change. As I watched those two men, splendidly typical of the invincible patience and dogged industry bred in their race by long ages of that fierce struggle, I realized that their presence here was, in its way, a portent of no mean significance. It meant that the sea-breeze was rising, and the cloud moving at last.
If there be a Yellow Peril of the future, if the Western World’s persistent forebodings of danger to come from China’s teeming millions are justified by any cause other than the natural nervousness of our comfortable materialism, that cause lies assuredly in the growing perception by the Chinese people of the fact that relief from their intolerable life-struggle may be sought and found beyond the frontiers of the eighteen provinces, and in the fact that those who, as pioneers, have sought relief in this way, are gradually learning, in adapting themselves to new conditions of life, to free themselves from the fettering traditions which have made the race in China hereditary and unresisting victims of native misrule and foreign aggression.
II
This aspect of the Yellow Peril (to which I shall return) is not that which has usually attracted the attention and fretted the nerves of politicians and publicists in Europe and America. Ever since Japan’s victories over Russia, the Pickwickian Fat Boys of yellow journalism have found their pleasure and profit in making our comfortable feather-bed flesh creep with lurid descriptions of‘China Arming,’ with grim prophecies of the Celestial giant awakening and proceeding, after a brief period of military training, to overthrow the whole fabric of Western civilization.
Even after the Boxer rising in 1900 had once again demonstrated the utter fatuity of attributing to the passive sons of Han the qualities of a conquering race, this vision of a scientifically organized, efficient, and aggressive China continued to oppress the imagination of a world that has been taught to like its sensations hot and strong. After the Russo-Japanese war, the Yellow Peril waxed in fearfulness, partly because of the Russian government’s panicky belief in a Pan-Asiatic movement, and partly because of the highly intelligent work done by the official Japanese press bureau abroad. If His Majesty the Kaiser could profess, coram publico, to believe in the prospect of Europe forced to stand on the defensive against Asia, plain citizens were surely justified in looking for Armageddon from that quarter; and the Kaiser’s flights of poetic imagination had Sir Robert Hart’s prophecies to justify them in the press of the Western world.
The popular conception of the Yellow Peril military was based, in the first instance, on a widespread acceptance of two fantastic ideas: first, that ‘Asia for the Asiatics’ is a possible war-cry; and, secondly, that China is capable of rapidly emulating Japan in the matter of political progress and military efficiency. The Peril, as a bogy, derived all its awe-inspiring qualities from sheer weight of numbers. With a thoroughly effective national army (it has been freely estimated in the European press at forty millions of men in the near future), China, gladly supported by India and Japan, must soon have Europe at her mercy. The idea is in itself so utterly absurd, so completely opposed to all the teachings of history, and to our knowledge of the Chinese people, that its acceptance must, I think, be partly ascribable to vague race-memories subconsciously latent among European peoples, to certain unreasoning atavistic instincts, whose origins lie far back in those forgotten centuries, when all the world of the Middle Ages trembled before the resistless Mongol hosts, when Jenghiz Khan ruled from Korea to Muscovy, and when, from Cathay to Poland, every race had felt the heavy hand of an Asiatic conqueror.
Underlying the Yellow Peril idea of the present day, with its vague apprehensions of danger from the East, we may also trace, I believe, the workings and prickings of a collective bad conscience, an instinctive admission of the wrongs inflicted by the white races upon the defenseless Chinese people, and a sense of the fitness of retributive justice. No one can study the history of the relations of the Christian Powers with China during the past sixty years without realizing how little, despite all its professions of philanthropy, the West has done to improve the actual conditions of life for the East; how cynically our benevolent pretensions of altruism have cloaked persistent policies of aggression. While our missionaries have proclaimed the common brotherhood of man and the sanctity of human life, organizing famine relief works, building hospitals, and preaching sanitation in order to reduce a death-rate three times greater than that of the United States; while the Powers of Europe and America have united to insist upon the principle of the open door and equal opportunity as the inalienable birthright of every white man in China, we have made it plain to the Chinese that equal opportunities and the rights of common brotherhood are not for them unless, like the Japanese, they can learn to assert their right to them by force. The exclusion acts adopted by the Anglo-Saxon peoples of the American and Australian continents, to protect themselves against the undeniable economic superiority of the yellow races, are merely a manifestation of nature’s grimly fundamental law of self-preservation, in whose service might is ever right. But, in the face of our philanthropic professions, these acts are morally indefensible, and their hypocrisy becomes the more glaringly manifest when viewed in the light of international ‘ dollar diplomacy,’ whereby the birthrights of the weaker nations are bought and sold in the open market. Hence arises a collective bad conscience, disturbing at times to the moral dignity of our civilization, a conscience which vaguely realizes that if ever China should become an efficiently organized military power, she would be fully justified in exacting heavy reparation for these things.
A significant indication of this bad conscience, and of an intuitive fear of possible retaliation, was given at the time of Prince Katsura’s polite ‘conversations’ with the Russian government at St. Petersburg last summer, when the new friends, preparing for the dismemberment of China’s northern dependencies, cordially agreed that ‘if China should ever recover her balance sufficiently to turn her attention to national defenses, she should not be permitted to create a formidable army.’ It is obviously to the advantage of Russia and Japan that China should not ‘recover her balance,’ and it is highly suggestive of the lack of high principles in international politics, that the other Great Powers, represented by their politico-financial syndicates, should lend themselves to proceedings evidently intended to prevent her from so doing.
The vision of a Yellow Peril military is now steadily fading, in the light of new conditions and of facts which deprive it of all substance. ‘Asia for the Asiatics’ as a possible war-cry, or even as a tentative diplomatic shibboleth to offset the Monroe Doctrine, becomes obviously impossible in the face of the Russo-Japanese entente and its immediate consequences in Manchuria and Mongolia. The moral and material weaknesses of China’s military organization, as revealed by the events of the recent revolution and by the actual situation at Peking, have made it impossible to regard Sir Robert Hart’s ‘ millions of Boxers in serried ranks and war’s panoply’ as a menace to any but the Chinese themselves. Before China can possibly possess an efficiently organized and disciplined national army, she must have proved herself capable of effecting radical reforms throughout her whole fiscal and administrative system; she must, in other words, have evolved a class of officials, clean-handed and intelligently patriotic, capable of leading and inspiring a nation in arms. Without such a class, —of which there is at present no sign, — China’s military forces (foreign-drilled troops and provincial levies alike) will continue to be armed rabbles, mobs of men with guns, liable at any crisis to lend themselves to the purposes of political adventurers, a permanent menace to the security of life and property.
The Yellow Peril military, as an effective bugbear, is therefore doomed; nevertheless, because of its oft-proved usefulness to serve the ends of foreign statesmen and diplomats in the past, it is a phantom which is likely to be frequently invoked again by those who seek thereby to justify their policies of territorial aggression. Russia and Japan have lately used it with good effect, and their schemes have been greatly assisted by the purblind folly of Young China, which continues loudly to proclaim its pathetic warlike intentions and the immediate prospect of Chinese armies being organized and equipped on a gigantic scale. Sun Yatsen, for instance, publicly advises Yuan Shih-k’ai to place two or three millions of men on the Mongolian frontier, and Young China, splendidly indifferent to facts and figures, assumes that they are already on the way. At a recent conference at Clark University, one of the Chinese speakers, a young student, declared that the forces of the Republic, having easily overcome Manchu imperialism, were not likely to submit to Russian aggression, a statement typical of the boyish bravado and ignorant valor of his class, which was warmly applauded by his sympathetic audience.
But the cooler heads in China, the older men who recognize the hard fact that there are no efficient troops available to put into the field against Russia or Japan, have, by common consent, postponed to some future date (say, ten or fifteen years hence) the prospect of seeing China fully armed and prepared to resist foreign aggression. Their policy, as expressed in the native press and reproduced by many newspapers abroad, is to be one of future retaliation rather than of immediate resistance.
Sun Yat-sen himself has been reported as indifferent to the prospect of a period of alien domination, so sure is he that, sooner or later, the moral and economic superiority of his countrymen will enable them to conquer their conquerors. ‘Wait a little,’ says Young China; ‘give us but time to set our house in order, toorganize our finances, and to train our army; then you will see.’ But in this matter, Young China is merely following faithfully in the footsteps of its ancestors. Precisely thus did the mandarin, under the Manchu dynasty, endeavor to frighten the barbarian, and to head off his schemes of aggression. It is in accordance with every ancient principle of Chinese statecraft to devise ways and means of intimidating powerful foes; it is also in accordance with every tradition of the mandarin, ancient and modern, to get credit for the possession of a large army, rather than to have to pay for one. This latter tradition has lately been powerfully stimulated by the Chinese officials’ belief that the foreign financiers might be induced to advance funds for the redemption of the ‘war notes’ of the revolution and for military purposes; it was this belief that led T’ang Shaoyi, when Premier, to evolve, from his own consciousness and the reports of his fellow provincials, a Republican army of eighty divisions, most of which he proposed to disband, with the aid of a foreign loan. (It was at this time that the Nanking Assembly was solemnly passing academic resolutions in favor of universal conscription, without any reference to the financial aspects of that question.)
These things are nothing more than traditional mandarin tactics, with which the patient, toiling millions of the Chinese people are in no way concerned. The structural character of the race remains, and must long remain, essentially non-aggressive, by no means to be suddenly diverted from its ancient passive philosophy by changes in the outward forms and symbols of authority. As a Japanese military officer of high rank observed, after witnessing the foreign-drilled troops’ manœuvres in 1908, ‘The Chinese Dragon is being painted to look very fierce; nevertheless, he remains a paper dragon.’ The Japanese have never been under any delusions as to the Yellow Peril, which they know to be a myth.
III
Another aspect of the Peril which has oppressed the imagination of many superficial observers has resulted from the idea that, by the adoption of Western methods and Western machinery, China can be industrially organized to produce manufactured articles on a scale defying European competition. Belief in a Yellow Peril of this kind is possible only for those who accept the theory that the inherited tendencies, institutions, and social system of the Chinese are capable of sudden and racial change as the result of new political arrangements. For theorists of this type, who believe in the possibility of ‘inoculating’ the Chinese with a fighting spirit and a vigorous nationalism, there is nothing inherently improbable in the idea that they will suddenly become imbued with the qualities requisite for industrial organization, and relieved of the social and economic conditions which, from time immemorial, have made such organization impossible.
At first sight, it would seem, indeed, that a race which possesses millions of frugally industrious laborers, able and willing to work for wages varying between eight and fifteen cents a day, together with raw materials produced by the most efficient agriculturists on earth, and vast resources of undeveloped mineral wealth, a country unhampered by socialism and trade-union legislation, — should be able to bring industrial Europe to its knees. But the observer who studies the economic results of China’s social system, realizes that, until slow educative processes shall have produced a class of honest administrators, and, through them, a root-and-branch fiscal reform, there can never be any effective combination of labor and capital in China.
The existing social conditions and methods of government preclude all reasonable hope of developing the country’s potential resources and industries on a large scale, or of producing any rapid expansion of manufactured exports. It is not that the merchant class is lacking in business capacity or the educated class in intelligence, — far from it; the trouble lies in the fact that, in the absence of definitely recognized rights of property, protected by valid laws, the Chinese capitalist is not prepared either to invest his money in government undertakings, or to establish joint-stock industries upon which the mandarins would levy their direct or indirect ‘squeezes.’ Certain enthusiastic theorists of the type of Sun Yat-sen, who profess, or did profess, to believe that the average citizen’s reluctance to admit the possession of wealth in any squeezable form would pass with the passing of the Manchu dynasty, have been rapidly cured of that illusion by Young China’s proceedings in the matter of ‘ patriotic subscriptions.’ At the present moment, the Chinese merchant, even in the comparative security of the foreign settlements of Shanghai, dares not purchase landed property at auction in his own name for fear of attracting the unpleasant attentions of the Republican officials.
Given laws for the administration of joint-stock companies, and justice for the individual; given the abolition of the barrier-and-likin exactions on trade and a limit to the arbitrary rapacities of the excise and terminal tax squeezes; given, in fact, good government, there is no reason to doubt that the capitalists and merchants of China might speedily organize the opening-up of mines and the establishment of industries as successfully as their countrymen have done under the protection of British and Dutch colonies in the East. In the provinces of Kuangtung, Kuangse, and Fuhkien, at all events, there are plenty of returned emigrants, with practical experience and capital capable of taking the lead in an industrial movement.
Nothing but the fear of official tyranny and mandarin rapacity prevents the development of China’s mineral resources. The mine-owner has no hopes, under existing conditions, of organizing capital and labor with any certainty of profit; at the same time, he is naturally and violently opposed to the metropolitan or provincial authorities’ granting concessions of mining rights to foreigners, because he hopes that, in the course of time, he may be able to work them for his own benefit. And similarly with industrial enterprise. Chinese laborers, artisans, and merchants, working individually or in guilds, are economically superior to any race on earth, but the opportunities and the technical education necessary for wholesale industrial organization of an effective kind are at present entirely beyond them. The materials are there, but it will take several generations to erect the structure, which requires, before all else, solid foundations of social and economic reform. And even if China were ready and able to organize industrialism of the scientific kind which prevails in Europe and America, and to master the elements of modern industrial finance; even if she were prepared, under the direction of foreign experts, to train her people in the skilled labor of factories and dockyards, the white races still could, and would, protect themselves by tariff walls against the competition of the Asiatic’s cheap labor, just as they now protect themselves from his presence in their own countries by their exclusion acts.
IV
There remains the Yellow Peril racial. At first sight it is evident that the conditions under which the Chinese have until quite recently been wont to emigrate in search of work and wealth, have not been of a nature to threaten the countries concerned with race-problems of the kind produced by the Negro population of the United States or the Jews in Russia. Hitherto (and, generally speaking, at the present day), the Chinese emigrant has been a transient breadwinner, and not a permanent settler, overseas. Going abroad under the stern necessity of mass pressure, his home and his family have remained in China, and if he died abroad his body was sent back for burial in the ancestral graveyard. He was, in fact, firmly bound to the homeland by immemorial ties and traditions of ancestor-worship. The effect of his cheap-labor competition on the white races, and the defensive measures taken against it, have therefore been of their nature local and economic, and not racial.
In order to appreciate the present conditions and tendencies of Chinese emigration, it is necessary to bear in mind the fact that it is only since the opening up of commercial intercourse, and improved means of communication between China and the outside world, that the people of China, or, rather, the people of the congested southeastern maritime provinces, have come to the knowledge that relief from the ever-present menace of starvation en masse may be sought and found overseas. Prior to the date of the Burlingame treaty between the United States and China (1868), the exodus of Cantonese and Fuhkien laborers had been practically confined to the nearer Oriental lands of the westward traderoutes, to Siam, and Borneo, and the Malay States; but it was then only a thin stream of adventurous pioneers. Until that date, relief from the constant pressure of population had been effected, internally, by nature’s drastic remedies, — by famine and pestilence, by infanticide and the slaughter of frequent rebellions. In the Burlingame treaty, the American government cordially recognized ‘the inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance,’with the immediate result that industrious and thrifty Chinese from the Kuang provinces began to emigrate by thousands in the ‘ fire-ships’ of the foreigner to the new lands of promise on the Pacific coast of America, their numbers rapidly increasing as the tale was spread of the wealth to be acquired in California.
But within ten years the white population of that state had realized the inherent fallacy of the doctrine of the open door and equal opportunity, and, clearly perceiving the economic superiority of the yellow race, had proceeded to enforce the fundamental principles of self-preservation. Chinese emigration to the white man’s countries has since that time been stopped by force majeure; but not before several millions of intelligent southern Chinese have learned by practical experience that, beyond the borders of their own land, relief is to be found from the burdens imposed upon them by bad government and economic pressure. And this knowledge has steadily increased and spread through the interior of China, brought back by returned emigrants, taught by foreign missionaries, diffused by educational bodies and by the press, so that to-day, among the educated classes in all parts of the country, and among the laboring classes of the South, there exists a clear perception of the relief which lies in emigration and a feeling of deep and perfectly just resentment against the white races, which preach the gospel of brotherhood and equal opportunity on the one hand, and, on the other, refuse its benefits to the Chinese race in all parts of the world.
Thus the ever-insistent problems of population and food-supply have of recent years been complicated by new conditions arising directly from the changes which have taken place in China’s environment, as the result of the impact of the West. For instance, the work of missionary and educational bodies, and the introduction of certain measures of public health and sanitation spreading from the treaty ports, are tending to produce a diminution of the death-rate, which, under normal conditions in the interior, necessarily approximates to the birth-rate, and is computed at something like fifty-five per thousand. In other words, the effect of the introduction of Western ideas is to increase the pressure of population on the visible means of subsistence, precisely as it is doing in India. At the same time, the great natural outlet for the surplus millions which the Chinese government has been lately seeking to develop, by means of railways and assisted colonization, in the thinly populated regions of Manchuria and Mongolia, is now being closed by the territorial encroachments of Russia and Japan. Thus, while our medical and other missions are teaching the Chinese, on humanitarian principles, ideas which tend to increase the mass pressure of population, the policies of the World Powers, dictated by instincts either of self-preservation or of earthhunger, are steadily confining this nonaggressive race within narrower limits.
Under these conditions, it was to be expected that, among the intelligent and active inhabitants of the southeastern maritime provinces, appreciation of the new forces and factors produced by education and economic pressure must soon bring about important modifications of the social system based on ancestor-worship and Confucianism. Under the stern pressure of necessity, and in the light of new knowledge, it was inevitable that the ancient traditions must go down in the struggle for life, and that the communities of Chinese overseas, the élite of the race, should gradually find means of adapting themselves to their environment, accepting the destiny of permanent settlers in lands far from their ancestral homes and burial-places. And so it is coming to pass: to-day, in several parts of the world, there are unmistakable indications of a weakening of the ties of ancestor-worship as a rigidly localizing tradition of the race. In the Straits Settlements, a large proportion of the Chinese population (economically the dominant race) have abandoned the practice of sending their dead back for burial in the home-land, though in other respects their pride of nationality and social customs remain unchanged. Throughout the Malay States they have become permanent settlers, distinguished from the labor emigrants who formerly went to America and those who were employed in South Africa, by having their families with them. The family, the unit of the Chinese system has, in fact been transplanted, Nature’s sternest law finally triumphing over one of the most permanent social systems ever established by man.
Cut off from North America and Australia, the Chinese emigration movement toward Burma, Siam, Malaya, and Borneo is steadily proceeding, but its conditions are changing. In Burma, for instance, where the Chinese population has more than doubled in the last ten years, many of the emigrants become permanent settlers, and intermarry freely with the Burmese women; the sons of such marriages becoming Chinese by nationality, and the daughters remaining Burmese. In Siam, there are already some three million Chinese; everything points, in fact, to a steady flow westward of the great tide of China’s hunger-driven humanity, and to the probability that those who emigrate will gradually shed their racial customs and traditions, wherever these conflict with their chances of success and survival. In the provinces to the north of the Yangtse, the same forces are at work, but, because of the less actively self-helping type of race in these regions, their results are far less conspicuous than in the case of the population which emigrates from the south-eastern maritime provinces.
Nevertheless, the tide of the predestined hungry ones flows also northward and west, wherever vacant lands are to be found, and means of communication permit. All along the Siberian and Manchurian railways, for instance, Chinese colonists are steadily making their way, demonstrating at every step their economic superiority. Prior to the outbreak of the revolution settlers (chiefly from Shantung) were moving into Mongolia, on foot, at the rate of about eight thousand a month. Russia has now forbidden the Chinese government to take any further steps toward the colonization of this region, but no ukase of the Czar can possibly check the steady flow of that resistless tide, or protect the thriftless Slav from the consequences of his own economic inefficiency. Herein, for Russia, lies the shadow of the real Yellow Peril, a peril against which she, the aggressor, can protect herself only by openly violating every principle of humanity and justice.
One of the most significant aspects of the Chinese emigration movement of to-day is to be found, not in Asia, but on the Pacific coast of South America, — in Chile and Peru. Here, almost unnoticed, the new impulses brought about by education and the fierceness of the life-struggle in China, are producing results of unmistakable significance. Among the fifteen thousand Chinese settlers in Peru, says a recent British consular report, there are many who have become Christians and who have intermarried with the Peruvians. The Chinese colony is rich and influential; it has taken firm root in this new land, while it retains undiminished its pride of race and its active sympathies for the progressive movement in China.
Now it is safe to predict that this movement of emigration to the tropical and sub-tropical countries of South America is certain to develop rapidly in proportion to the development of direct means of communication which will follow from the opening of the Panama Canal. The Cantonese, held back from other fields of activity, will assuredly seek them, as rapidly as possible, in those regions of Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Chile, where agricultural and other work is essentially a question of labor, and not of white labor.
Economically speaking, the development of husbandry and industry in these regions by the labor of Orientals would appear to offer the only practical solution of problems upon which, in no small degree, depends the material welfare of the human race. Politically, however, the possibility of large numbers of Chinese and Japanese settling on the American continent opens up prospects of new racial difficulties in the future. Herein the separate interests of individual South American republics may well be found to conflict with those Pan-American or Monroe Doctrine ideas which lately found expression in the resolution of the United States Senate to forbid the acquisition by Japan of ‘fishing rights’ and a harbor on the Mexican coast. For, where the present-day Cantonese go, as settlers, they will assuredly take root, and where they take root they will speedily increase and multiply.
In the Chinese people’s collective aversion to starvation, and in their partial but increasing perception of ways and means to avert that unpleasant end, by processes of ‘peaceful penetration’ beyond China’s frontiers, we may perceive, I think, dimly outlined against the horizon of the future, the Yellow Peril racial. It is a peril against which, as I have said, the civilized nations of the West can protect themselves effectively only by denying the fundamental principles of philanthropy, and Christianity’s ideals of common brotherhood. From our whiteracial point of view, which assumes the moral superiority of Western civilization over that of the East, and the desirability of letting white men, rather than yellow, inherit the earth, this Yellow Peril remains, for the present, still indefinite and remote. From the broad philosophical and sublunary
point of view, there is nothing to show that it really threatens the ultimate good of humanity. But, however we regard the matter, and even adopting the racial standpoint, the most violent activities of the Chinese race (which not only professes, but practices, the belief that right is superior to might) will ever be kindly and gentle compared with the White Perils that at present encompass China on every side.