“Indeed they do, Miss Parker!  But to get on with our shibboleths.  We hear a great deal of twaddle about the law of the survival of the fittest.  I’m willing to abide by such a natural law, provided the competition is confined to mine own people—­and I’m one of those chaps, who, to date, has failed to survive.  But I cannot see any common sense in opening the lists to Orientals.  We Californians know we cannot win in competition with them.”  He paused and glanced at Kay.  “Does all this harangue bore you, Miss Parker?”

“Not at all.  Are there any more shibboleths?”

“I haven’t begun to enumerate them.  Take, for instance, that old pacifist gag, that Utopian dream that is crystallized in the words:  ‘The road to universal peace.’  All the long years when we were not bothered by wars or rumors of wars, other nations were whittling each other to pieces.  And these agonized neighbors, longing, with a great longing, for world-peace, looked to the United States as the only logical country in which a great cure-all for wars might reasonably be expected to germinate.  So their propagandists came to our shores and started societies looking toward the establishment of brotherly love, and thus was born the shibboleth of universal peace, with Uncle Sam heading the parade like an old bell-mare in a pack train.  What these peace-patriots want is peace at any price, although they do not advertise the fact.  We proclaim to the world that we are a Christian nation. Ergo, we must avoid trouble.  The avoidance of trouble is the policy of procrastinators, the vacillating, and the weak.  For one cannot avoid real trouble.  It simply will not be avoided; consequently, it might as well be met and settled for all time.”

“But surely,” Parker remarked, “California should subordinate herself to the wishes of the majority.”

“Yes, she should,” he admitted doggedly, “and she has in the past.  I think that was before California herself really knew that Oriental emigration was not solely a California problem but a national problem of the utmost importance.  Indeed, it is international.  Of course, in view of the fact that we Californians are already on the firing-line, necessarily it follows that we must make some noise and, incidentally, glean some real first-hand knowledge of this so-called problem.  I think that when our fellow citizens know what we are fighting, they will sympathize with us and promptly dedicate the United States to the unfaltering principle that ours is a white man’s country, that the heritage we have won from the wilderness shall be held inviolate for Nordic posterity and none other.”

“Nevertheless, despite your prejudice against the race, you are bound to admire the Japanese—­their manners, thrift, industry, and cleanliness.”  Parker was employing one of the old stock protests, and Don Miguel knew it.