the part of American manufacturers and merchants for that trade and a determination to get it by all honorable means. Ship subsidies, investments in Chinese railways, the Americanization of Chinese finance, the intervention of the American Government in behalf of the Open Door policy-all these will count for nothing until American merchants supply the goods the Chinese want, in the packages they desire, and on terms convenient to their commercial methods. In other words, a sympathetic understanding of the Chinese and their needs is the first essential. Second, the promotion of the Open Door policy formulated by Secretary Hay. The "Open Door" means simply that all nations shall be permitted to trade in China on equal terms, with no discriminations or favoritism shown to any nation on the part of the Chinese Government. It does not mean that China shall not impose taxes and tariffs, but that the taxes and tariffs shall apply to all nations alike. Agricultural implements may be taxed, but not merely American agricultural implements; the importation of unsanitary meat products may be prohibited, but not merely American unsanitary meat prod ucts. The American people should support the American Government in every honorable attempt to aid China in maintaining the Open Door. For China wants to maintain it; it is to the interest of every European nation, except perhaps Russia, to maintain it. Russia and Japan are so strongly intrenched in Manchuria that they may jointly strive to nullify the Open Door policy for their own selfish advantage. If so, they should be persuaded that they are not merely doing an injustice to China, but are seriously offending the three strongest commercial and martial nations of the Occident-England, Germany, and the United States. It is true that the Open Door policy is not regarded by the people of the United States as being in the same category with the Monroe Doctrine; the latter, on the ground that its integrity is essential to our National existence, we should cheerfully defend by force against the whole of Europe if necessary; the former appeals to our sense of justice, and to obtain justice we ought to exhaust every peaceful means known to frank diplomacy before taking a single step in the direction of force. Nevertheless, the Open Door is necessary to the development of civilization in China, and the United States should never, and in our judgment will never, relax a proper insistence upon its observance by Japan and Russia. Third, a clear understanding that through our occupation of the Philippines and our building of the Panama Canal we have obligations to perform with regard to the development of China and the whole Orient in its relations to China. One of these obligations is to aid China in her struggle for Western education. Selected Chinese students should not only be welcomed but should be induced to come to American schools and universities. The admirable remission of the Boxer indemnity during President Roosevelt's Administration and the application of some of the money of this indemnity to the education of Chinese in the United States was a long step in the right direction. Fourth, President Taft should be loyally supported in his efforts to aid China in the \ reforms she has undertaken to make in her financial system. The best-informed economists agree that the greatest obstacle in the way of China's commercial development is the chaos prevailing in Chinese finance. The United States Government is taking the greatest interest in co-operating with the leading Powers to help China frame a sound scheme of National finance. It is believed that an important feature of China's financial plan is the appointment of a financial adviser, preferably an American. If America and China can persuade the European Powers that such an American adviser will be a man of distinguished ability and of disinterested determination to employ his office for the promotion of financial order, for the creation of a Chinese Department of the Treasury administered on modern lines by the Chinese themselves and for the placing of all foreign interests on an equality, more will have been done toward the preservation to China of peace, integrity, safety, and sound commercial development than has perhaps been done by any other one act of foreign political and commercial intercourse with China. A WORD FOR THE USUAL The title of Mr. Colby's new volume of essays, "Constrained Attitudes," suggests some kind of compulsion; as if the themes or the positions had been imposed on the writer. If either surmise is correct, Mr. Colby moves with enviable ease within the limitations, and speaks with refreshing frankness of habits of his contemporaries and of not a few of their halfgods and less interesting idolatries. The critic who refreshes himself with these keen thrusts at imposing platitudes, inherited credulities, and cast-iron self-deceptions will hesitate to speak of these essays as generously as he would like, lest Mr. Colby find in his commendation some of that easy assumption of authority, that subconscious conceit of opinion, which the essayist finds such easy game. Let it suffice, therefore, to say that he who enjoys a book of keen perception, sharp criticism, and alert intelligence cannot afford to leave "Constrained Attitudes " unread. It is a lively oasis in a desert of monotonous collected essays by serious and heavyhanded persons. The practice of deliberate and profitable humbug has been a fine art since the beginning of history, and has furnished the comic journals with inexhaustible variety of themes and occasions. Mr. Colby is interested in the psychology of the unconscious practitioner of the gentle art of deceiving himself as well as his neighbors. This, for instance, is what he has to say about those groups of people who organize admiration for a writer into a trust which, from its very inception, aims directly at monopoly: "No one should be blamed for being suspicious of the literary cult. And it is as short-lived as it is deceitful; for it has been observed of its members, as of the blue-bottle fly, that they buzz the loudest just before they drop. Excesses of this sort have of late years been invariably followed by periods of severe repression, of silence almost propor i nate to the degree of garrulity when the talking fit was on. The hush that settled on 'Trilby' and Robert Elsmere' endures to this day. The reader of The Man with the Hoe,' if there be one, is as the owl in 1 Constrained Attitudes. By Frank M. Colby. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. the desert; and upon the lips of the Omarian the spider builds its web. Men still find pleasure in the writings of Stevenson, but where are the Stevensonians? Where are the Smithites, Brownists, and Robinsonians of yesterday? Let a subject once fall to the cult, let the lavish tongues of small expounders have their way, and the waters soon close over it." Mr. Colby finds easy game in those persons of literal mind who are always trying to "do sums" in literature and reduce everything to pounds, shillings, and pence; who are persuaded that the poetry of the day can be standardized, so to speak, and the relative value of the poets accurately determined by weights or measures; who ask bewildered editors who are "the five greatest female novelists, which are their five greatest novels, and what are the names of their five greatest characters." It is reported of a distinguished college president that he received a letter from an anxious inquirer who wrote: "I hear that you are the greatest thinker in America; will you please send me your greatest thought?"-a very embarrassing question to put to a modest man! It is the National proclivity to regulate commerce in ideas and art which keeps alive interest in the "best sellers." The commonplace comes in for gentle castigation at the hands of this bantering essayist, whose clear-cut standards and pungent phrases do not disguise the force and veracity of his criticism. It is a theme which has yielded an easy and early harvest to shrewd, and sometimes to dull, cultivators since the beginning of satire and irony. The commonplace amounts to a portentous sum in life, and it seems at times as if large sections of society were stricken with a monotonous dullness. The young commuter who lives on a small income in a small house in a suburban town and wheels a perambulator before and after church on a pleasant Sunday is an easy prey for the satirist who is not afraid to repeat an old tale glibly. If one groans in spirit with those whose lives are hedged about with the usual and feels like breaking all the windows, he will find pleasure in Mr. Colby's shrewd comments on "Hedda Gabler;" but if he needs a good strong tonic, let him read Miss Sinclair's 1 latest story, "The Creators,' a report of the unusual made with great ability and in minute detail. There are commonplace people in this novel, but they are introduced solely for the purpose of putting solid ground under the uncommonplace. The central group, "the Creators," are all people of genius. They live, move, and have their being in a sphere of their own, with mutual understanding, a common language, and a kind of joint consciousness of a special function. The heroine, if the story has a heroine, is a woman with what might be called a "genius attachment "—a rare and inexplicable creative impulse which seizes her at times like the evil spirit in the Gospels and rends her. Miss Sinclair has at last freed herself of obsession as to the sex question, and has made an analysis of temperament of extraordinary insight and analytical skill; but her woman of genius is not convincing; the creative power does not seem to be a part of her; it is not the flowing together of all the secret forces of personality; it is something which comes to her from without. story is too long, the analysis too heavily underscored, the talk too voluminous; the book is charged with ability, but it is not thoroughly dramatized. The All Nevertheless, “The Creators" is a capital antidote for impatience with the commonplace; it would be difficult to put more unhappiness between covers! the Creators share a tormenting self-consciousness; they are driven by the wind of destiny; they are generous and loyal, but they never lay hold on content or repose. Happiness is not the end of life, but there ought to be some normal ease, some natural adaptation to environment, in every group of people; in this group everything is at sixes and sevens. No sooner do a little wholesome peace and a few months of normal habit wait on these Creators than a blast of genius makes their wives hateful to them, their husbands repulsive, and their babies objects of loathing. One turns with relief to the young commuter propelling the perambulator along the suburban street. His life is not exciting, but he has no desire to strangle his child or elope with his neighbor's wife; The Creators. By May Sinclair. The Century Company, New York. he is not tossed on a sea of surging passion which will carry him to a divorce court or to the penitentiary; his wife does not follow Madame Bovary in order to vary the dull round of daily duties. The interests of the young married commuter may not be broad or stimulating, but he keeps his honor and betrays his friend neither in his home nor in his purse. He is an easy mark for the satirist, and it requires no great genius to make sport of the perambulator; but in any sane view of life it is at least an open question whether he does not get more out of life and put more into it than the Superman whose chief characteristic is a selfishness so brutal and colossal that it is a kind of elephantiasis of individuality, a monstrous deformity. In the reaction against the normal and usual people forget that the abnormal and unusual develop a monotony of their own, and that the escape from the perambulator to the lunatic asylum is not an escape from dull routine to freedom, but an exchange of one form of commonplaceness for another. To the layman lunacy seems rich in variety of delusion; but the alienists tell us that the illusions of the insane are very few and are easily classified. Out of every thousand a definite percentage of the insane will be Mary, Queen of Scots; another definite percentage will own everything within sight-a widespread form of delusion; another percentage will enjoy the distinction of being George Washington. There is evidently no escape from monotony through the asylum or the penitentiary. Nor is it possible to conceal the fact that even the great apostles of the revolt against the monotony of the daily round. move in regular circles and soon become as monotonous as those who wheel the perambulator. One speedily becomes familiar with Ibsen's interesting ladies and can calculate their fates with mathematical accuracy. Their orbits are eccentric; but they are orbits, nevertheless. The vivacious and much-advertising Mr. Shaw cannot conceal the rhythm of his irony or satire, and we predict the exact point at which his characters will discard their masks and show old, familiar faces. Mr. Chesterton goes his cheerful and paradoxical round, and we gladly go with him; but it is a round, just the same. Even among those who try so desperately to escape from the monotonous order of life that they plunge into tragedy, the element of the usual still persists; and broken marriage vows, "free unions," following one's star without reference to the order of the heavens, being loyal to impulse, and all the other shortcuts to freedom-which is not a fixed state but a condition won by self-restraint and discipline-end monotonously in misery, disgrace, and bitter disillusion. Since a certain monotony is evidently part of the normal order of things and is apparently a necessary safeguard for sanity, is not the dullness of health as profitable as the dullness of disease? Is it not better to be a little dull with Colonel Newcome than to be brilliant with one of the brilliant degenerates who play their despicable parts in some contemporary novels and dramas? to keep one's honor in quietness than to break faith with the sanctities of life by a brief and hectic vivacity? ORIENTAL IMMIGRATION A great popular conviction may be false, but it must always be taken seriously in a democracy. There is a great popular con viction on the Pacific coast that Oriental immigration is perilous to American institutions. This is not merely a class prejudice of laborers against competing laborers. In 1879 the Legislature of California ordered a test vote to be taken for and against Chinese immigration. The result was that out of 162,000 votes there were but 638 for such immigration. The ballot was secret; the conclusion is certain the people of the State were then practically a unit against such immigration. There is no reason to think that any change in the public sentiment of the Pacific coast has taken place since that time. There is very good reason to believe that it now extends to Japanese as well as to Chinese We know of no better single volume for the student of this subject than Volume XXXIV, No. 2, of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science" (September, 1909) on the "Chinese and Japanese in America," in which, in a series of papers by different contributors, the whole subject is pre sented in both its National and international relations, and by those who favor and those who oppose such immigration. For our statement of facts and for many of the arguments presented in this editorial we are indebted to this volume. immigration. This is not a passing passion; it is not a class prejudice; it is a permanent conviction. Various reasons are given for this conviction, but they are not the real, certainly not the fundamental, reasons. It is said that the Orientals are barbarians: the civilization of the Chinese is, if less progressive, far older than our own, and the modern civilization of the Japanese has been demonstrated by a successful war with what was before regarded as one of the first military powers of Europe. That the Orientals are vicious: their vices are different, but not worse, than those of their Western neighbors. That they are ignorant: the percentage of illiterates in Japanese immigrants is twenty-two, in southern Italian immigrants fifty-four, in Portuguese immigrants sixty-eight. That the slums in San Francisco are intolerable: whatever may be true of the Chinese, the Japanese are largely farm laborers and are becoming farm owners and fruit cultivators. That their habits are filthy: Robert Louis Stevenson bears a different testimony: "The emigrants declared that the Chinese were dirty. I cannot say they were clean, for that was impossible upon the jourthey put the rest of us to shame." That ney; but in their efforts after cleanliness the coolies are practically slaves who are shipped here en masse and whose labor is sold by contractors: if this was ever true, it is true no longer, and never was even alleged of the Japanese. That they buy up town and country property, and wherever they settle the white man moves out which may be a reason for forbidding aliens to own land, but might only be a reason for eradicating white prejudice. That their standards of living are low and they accept wages on which a white man cannot support his family ; in support of which figures are given showing that the average wage paid Orientals in Hawaii is about half that paid to whites, and the hours of labor are longer: it is true, to quote Professor Commons, that "the future of American democracy is the future of the American wage-earner. To have an enlightened and patriotic citizenship we must protect the wages and the standard of living of those who constitute the bulk of the citizens;" but it is also true that experience indicates that a limited Oriental immigration will not permanently depress wages, that the Oriental soon learns to demand the current rate and to get it. The real reason for the opposition to Oriental immigration is its effect on the future of America. Zangwill says that God is throwing all European races into the melting-pot and forming out of them the America of the future. The oppo nents of Oriental immigration believe that the Oriental in America will always remain an alien element, unassimilated and unassimilable. The objection is well put by a philosophic student who is at least without local prejudice, Herbert Spencer : I have, for the reasons indicated, entirely approved of the regulations which have been established in America for restricting Chinese immigration, and had I the power I would restrict them to the smallest possible amount; my reason for this decision being that one of two things must happen. If the Chinese are allowed to settle extensively in America, they must either, if they remain unmixed, form a subjective race standing in the position, if not of slaves, yet of a class approaching slaves; or, if they mix, they must form a bad hybrid. In either case, supposing the immigration to be large, immense social mischief must arise, and eventually social disorganization. The same thing would happen if there should be any considerable mixture of a European race with the Japanese. This peril seems to the Atlantic coast dweller remote, but this is because, to him, the problem is remote. The peril is serious, or would be if steps had not already been taken to guard against it. It is the negro problem over again, made more perilous because back of the Oriental immigration are two great nations, one in the process of formation, the other already one of the great world powers. In the judgment of The Outlook, Mr. C. H. Rowell, of the Fresno " Republican," is absolutely right: "The Pacific coast is the frontier of the white man's world, the culmination of the westward immigration which is the white man's whole history. It will remain the frontier so long as we guard it as such; no longer. Unless it is maintained there, there is no other line at which it can be maintained without more effort than American government and American civilization are able to sustain." We do not agree with him that "there is no right way to solve a race problem except to stop it before it begins." But if this is not the only way, it is the simplest, the easiest, and the best way. In the case of the European races education solves the problem. The educated German, Scandinavian, or Italian, if not the educated Slav, becomes in the second or third generation an American. But the educated Oriental remains an Oriental. Lafcadio Hearn had certainly no antiJapanese prejudice; and it is Lafcadio Hearn who says: Hearn who says: "The Japanese child is as close to you as the European child— perhaps cleaner and sweeter, because infinitely more natural and refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated, the farther you push him from you. As the Oriental thinks naturally to the left where we think to the right, the more you cultivate him, the more he will think in the opposite direction from you." Rudyard Kipling's lines point in the same direction; and few Orientals know the Orient better than does Rudyard Kipling : 66 Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat." It is better that they should not meet. It is not that the Chinese and the Japa nese are inferior races; it is that they are different; and it is better that different men, though frankly recognizing one another as equals in the major qualities of civilization, should have different homes. It is an old adage that no house is large enough for two families. No nation is large enough for two races. The East for the Oriental, the West for the Occidental, with no attempt to keep house together, but free intermingling in international trade, is the true solution of the Oriental problem. This is the solution which the democratic instinct on the Pacific coast has hit upon. And the democratic instinct is right. |