who cannot or will not live in competition with Oriental frugality.  The valley, or cove, or flat has become Japanese.  They do not amalgamate.  Their progeny are Japanese unchanged; and their progeny born here are American citizens.  In the face of public sentiment, restriction, savage resentment they have made head.  They are continuing to make head.  The effects are as yet small in relation to the whole of the body politic; but more and more of the fertile, beautiful little farm centres of California are becoming the breeding grounds of Japanese colonies.  As the pressure of population on the other side increases, it is not difficult to foresee a result.  We are afraid of them.

The ranchmen know this.  “We would use white labour,” say they, “if we could get it, and rely on it.  But we cannot; and we must have labour!” The debt of California to the Orientals can hardly be computed.  The citrus crop is almost entirely moved by them; and all other produce depends so largely on them that it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that without them a large part of the state’s produce would rot in fields.  We do not want the Oriental; and yet we must have him, must have more of him if we are to reach our fullest development.  It is a dilemma; a paradox.

And yet, it seems to me, the paradox only exists because we will not face facts in a commonsense manner.  As I remember it, the original anti-Oriental howl out here made much of the fact that the Chinaman and Japanese saved his money and took it home with him.  In the peculiar circumstances we should not object to that.  We cannot get our work done by our own people; we are forced to hire in outsiders to do it; we should expect, as a country, to pay a fair price for what we get.  It is undoubtedly more desirable to get our work done at home; but if we cannot find the help, what more reasonable than that we should get it outside, and pay for it?  If we insist that the Oriental is a detriment as a permanent resident, and if at the same time we need his labour, what else is there to do but pay him and let him go when he has done his job?

And he will go if pay is all he gets.  Only when he is permitted to settle down to his favourite agriculture in a fertile country does he stay permanently.  To be sure a certain number of him engages in various other commercial callings, but that number bears always a very definite proportion to the Oriental population in general.  And it is harmless.  It is not absolute restriction of immigration we want—­although I believe immigration should be numerically restricted, but absolute prohibition of the right to hold real estate.  To many minds this may seem a denial of the “equal rights of man.”  I doubt whether in some respects men have equal rights.  Certainly Brown has not an equal right with Jones to spank Jones’s small boy; nor do I believe the rights of any foreign nation paramount to our own right to safeguard ourselves by proper legislation.