though it were a reflection on the neighbor's dignity. That I might not seem to be hurrying, I asked if his friend kept watch-dogs. He assured me the neighbor could not afford them.

That night with the man around the corner was like a chapter from that curious document, "The Gospel according to St. John." He "could not afford to turn a man away, because once he slept three nights in the rain when he walked here from West Georgia. No one would give him shelter. After that he decided that when he had a roof he would go shares with whoever asked. Some strangers were good, some bad, but he would risk them all." Imagine this amplified in the drawling wheeze of the cracker, sucking his corncob pipe for emphasis.

His real name and his address are in my note-book. Let us call him the man under the yoke. He was lean as an old opium-smoker. He was sooty as a pair of tongs. His Egyptian-mummy jaws bore a two weeks' beard. His shirt had not been washed since the flood. His ankles were innocent of socks. His hat had no band. I verily believe his pipe was hereditary, smoked first by a bondslave in Jamestown, Virginia.

He could not read. I presume his wife could not. They were much embarrassed when I wanted them to show me Lakeland on the map. They had warned me against that village as a place where itinerant strangers were shot full of holes. Well, I found that town pretty soon on the map, and made the brief, snappy memorandum in my note-book, "Avoid Lakeland."

There were three uncertain chairs on the porch, one a broken rocker. Therefore the company sat on the railing loafing against the pillars. The plump wife was frozen with diffidence. The genial, stubby neighbor, a man from 'way back in the woods, after telling me how to hop freight-cars, departed through an aperture in the wandering fence.

The two babies on the floor, squealing like shoats, succeeded in being good without being clean. They wrestled with the puppies who emerged from somewhere to the number of four. I wondered if the man under the yoke

would turn to a dog-man when the puppies grew up and learned to bark.

Supper was announced by the admonition, "Bring the chairs." The rocking-chair would not fit the kitchen table. Therefore the two babies occupied one chair, the lord of the house another, and the kitchen chair was allotted to your servant. The mother hastened to explain that she was not hungry." After snuffing the smoking lamp that had no chimney, she paced at regular intervals between the stove and her lord, piling hot biscuits before him.

I could not offer my chair and make it plain that some one must stand. I expressed my regret at her lack of appetite, and fell to. Their hospitality did not fade when I considered that they ate such provisions every day. There was a dish of salt pork that tasted like a salt mine. We had one deep plate in common, containing a soup of lukewarm water, tallow, half-raw fat pork, and wilted greens. This dish was innocent of any enhancing condiment. I turned to the biscuit-pile.

They were raw in the middle. I kept up courage by watching the children consume the tallow soup with zest. After taking one biscuit for meat and another for vegetables, I ate a third for goodfellowship. The mother was anxious that her children should be a credit, and shook them, too strictly, I thought, for burying their hands in the main dish.

Meanwhile the man under the yoke told me how his bosses in the lumber camp kept his wages down to the point where the grocery bill took all his pay, how he was forced to trade at the "company store" there in the heart of the pine woods. He had cut himself in the saw-pit, had been laid up for a month, and, "like a fool," had gone back to the same business.

Last year he had saved a little money, expecting to get things "fixed up nice," but the whole family was sick from June to October. He liked his fellow-workmen. They had to stand all he did. They loved the woods, and because of this love would not move to happier fortunes. Few had been to any place beyond Jacksonville. They did not understand traveling. They did not understand the traveler, and were

"likely to be mean to him." Then he asked me whether I thought "niggers had souls. I answered "Yes." He agreed reluctantly. "They have a soul, of course, but it's a mighty small one." We adjourned to the front room, carrying our chairs down a corridor, where the open doorways we passed displayed uncarpeted floors and no furniture.

The echo of the slow steps of the man under the yoke reverberated through the wide house like muffled drums at a giant's funeral. Yet the largeness of the empty house was wealth. I have been entertained since in many a poorer castle. For instance, in Tennessee, where a deaf old man, a crone and her sister, a lame man, a slug of a girl, and a little orphan boy ate, cooked, and slept by an open fire, having neither stove, lamp, nor candle, I was made sacredly welcome for the night, though it was a oneroom cabin, with a low roof and a narrow door.

Thanks to the Giver of every good and perfect gift, pine knots cost nothing in a forest. New York has no such fire places as that in the front room of the man under the yoke. I thought of an essay by a New England sage on Compensation. There were many old scriptures rising in my heart as looked into that blaze. The one I remembered most was, "I was a stranger, and ye took me in." But I did not quote Scripture to my host, though it was Sunday night.

It was seven o'clock. The wife had put her babies to bed. She sat on the opposite side of the fire from us. Eight o'clock was bedtime, the host had to go to work so early. But our three hearts were bright as the burning pine for an hour.

You have enjoyed the golden embossed brocades of Hokusai. You have felt the charm of Maeterlinck's "The Blind." Think of these, then think of the shoulders of the man under the yoke embossed by the flame. Think of his voice as an

occult instrument, while he burned a bit of crackling brush, and spoke of the love he bore that fireplace, the memory of the evenings his neighbors had spent there with him, the stories told, the pipes smoked, the good silent times with wife and children. It was said by hints and repetitions and broken syllables, but it was said. We ate and drank in the land of heart's desire. This man and his wife sighed at the fitting times, and smiled when to smile was to understand, when I recited a few of the rhymes of the dear singers of to-day and yesterday, Yeats, and Lanier, Burns, and even Milton. This fire was as the treasure, at the end of the rainbow. I had not been rainbow-chasing in vain.

As my host rose and knocked out his pipe, he told how interesting lumbering with oxen could be made, if a man once understood how they were driven. He assured me that the most striking thing in all these woods was a team of ten oxen. He directed me to a road whereby I would be sure to see half a dozen to-morrow. He said that if ever I met a literary man, to have him write them into verses. Therefore the next day I took the route and observed; and be sure, if ever I meet the proper minstrel, I shall exhort him with my strength to write the poem of the yoke.

As to that night, I slept in that room in the corner away from the fireplace, looking into it. One comfort was over me, one comfort and pillow between me and the dark floor. The pillow was laundried at the same time as the shirt of my host. There is every reason to infer that the pillow and comfort came from his bed.

They slept far away, in some mysterious part of the empty house. I hoped they were not cold. I looked into the rejoicing fire. I said, "This is what I came out into the wilderness to see. This man had nothing, and gave me half of it, and we both had abundance."

this sequence of events.

The Japanese send to the San Franciscans $246,000 as a token of helpful friendliness and sympathy, and the San Franciscans reciprocate by stoning eminent Japanese scientists in the streets, by attacking Japanese Christians who are on their way to a Sunday church service, and by excluding Japanese scholars from primary and grammar schools which they have attended for years and which are open to Italians, Germans, Scandinavians, Russians, Poles, Armenians, Mexicans, Greeks, Jews, and representatives of nearly all the nationalities of the Old World. What are the reasons for this intolerant hatred of the Japanese, which not only effaces remembrance of courtesy and kindness, but seems, in some of its manifestations, to overstep the bounds of decency and law? It must be a very strong feeling, and it must rest upon elemental facts and emotions of human nature. It is my purpose, in this article, to give the results of such study as I have been able to make of the Japanese school question on the Pacific Coast.

As the exclusion of Japanese children from the white public schools brought about the clash between the Federal authorities and the San Francisco Board of Education, I shall take up that subject first. It is, in itself, a comparatively trivial episode, but in it are involved all the factors of the Japanese problem, and it may properly serve, therefore, as an introduction to the larger and more important questions of economic competition and race antipathy.

The law under which the San Francisco Board of Education acted, when it barred the Japanese out of primary and grammar schools attended by whites, was enacted March 12, 1872,1 and was aimed exclusively at the Chinese. There was no Japanese immigration at that time, and the words "separate schools for children of Mongolian or Chinese descent" were evidently intended to apply only to immigrants from the Asiatic mainland. The "segregation" school established under the provisions of this law was situated in the heart of China

1 It was amended April 7, 1888; March 30, 1891; March 23, 1893; and March 5, 1903.

town, and was officially known, for many years, as the "Chinese School." When Japanese immigrants in considerable numbers began to arrive in San Francisco, their children were not segregated" in the Chinese School, but were admitted, without question or objection, to the schools attended by whites; and, so far as I have been able to ascertain, it was not until 1901, when the labor unions obtained control of the city government, that any concerted action was taken against the Japanese, in the schools or out of them. After that time there slowly grew up a feeling of hostility to the Japanese, based partly upon their alleged untrustworthiness, partly on a fear of economic competition, and partly upon a feeling of race antipathy; and the Board of Education began to receive letters from the parents of white scholars, complaining of the enforced association of their children with the children of Japanese immigrants in the public schools. The Board, which was the creation of a labor union administration, sympathized, apparently, with these complaints, but was unable to take action upon them, owing to the fact that the Chinese School was already full, and there was no money available for a second school of segregation.

In the early part of 1905 the Board made an effort to secure an appropriation for the opening and maintenance of a distinctively Japanese school, but, on account, apparently, of the indifference of the municipal administration, which was busily engaged in grafting, this effort had no result. It attracted the attention, however, of the Japanese Consul, and in March, 1905, that officer, learning that the chief objection to Japanese scholars in the primary and grammar schools was their advanced age, suggested to the Japanese newspapers of the city that they advise the voluntary withdrawal of the older pupils. The papers acted upon this suggestion, and most of the older pupils did withdraw. I refer to this incident only as a proof that the Japanese were amenable to reason, and were willing to act in a friendly way on a complaint that seemed to be well founded.

On the 7th of May, 1905, a number of

trades union leaders founded the "Japanese and Corean Exclusion League," and this organization, by means of its meetings and its literature, soon increased the feeling of hostility to the Japanese, not only in San Francisco, but to some extent in the State. The earthquake and fire of April 18 destroyed the Chinese quarter of San Francisco, and drove so many of its residents to Oakland and Alameda that, when the Chinese School was reopened, there was room in it not only for all the Chinese scholars who presented themselves, but also for the Japanese, who at that time were distributed among twenty-three other schools. The Board of Education thereupon changed the name of the Chinese School, called it the "Oriental School," and attempted to segregate in it the Japanese scholars of the city, who for years had been attending primary and grammar schools on terms of perfect equality with children of American and European descent. When this discrimination against Japanese led to an international complication and forced the Federal Government to interfere, the Board of Education attempted to justify its action. by pleading, first, that the provisions of the State law of 1872 were mandatory and gave the Board no discretion; and, second, that an overwhelming majority of the so-called Japanese " school-boys " were grown men, who ought not to be allowed to sit beside young children, and especially younggirls, in primary schools. In the public and private discussion of the subject that immediately followed, the Board of Education, the California delegation in Congress, the San Francisco newspapers, the Exclusion League, and trade union leaders without exception, laid most stress upon the age of Japanese "boys" in the primary schools. Nobody attempted to ascertain the facts, but all declared, without inquiry or investigation, that the association of Japanese men with school-girls of tender years in the intimacy of school life was an intolerable evil which could no longer be endured. President Altmann, of the Board of Education, said: "We do not care to have our little children mixing with adult Japanese." (San Francisco Chronicle, December 7.) Senator

"not

Perkins declared that there were forty Japanese children of school age in San Francisco." (San Francisco Examiner, December 7.) Representative Hayes said: "Most of the Japanese pupils are youths from fifteen to twentyfive. It is nothing more than right and just to prohibit their attending school with young children." (San Francisco Chronicle, December 4.) The San Francisco Call said (December 4): "It is deemed inexpedient that adults should associate with little children in the intimate relations of school life." According to the San Francisco Newsletter (December 8): "A city ordinance eliminating all children, of whatever race or color, from the primary schools, when over sixteen, would eliminate ninety-five per cent. of the Japanese.' Alfred Roncovieri, Superintendent of Schools, declared that "these so-called Japanese children are, ninety-five per cent. of them, young men. We object to an adult Japanese sitting beside a twelve-year-old girl. If this be prejudice, we are the most prejudiced people in the world." (San Francisco Examiner, December 5.) Misled by these confident assertions, the usually accurate and well-informed correspondent of a prominent New York journal said: "It will be news to most Easterners that almost none of the Japanese school-boys are boys. Practically without exception, they are full-grown men, between the ages of twenty and thirty. Yet Japan expects them to be allowed to sit side by side, day after day, with American boys, and, more extraordinary yet, girls of tender years." (New York Sun, December 13.)

Persons and newspapers hostile to the Japanese, however, did not base their opposition to the presence of the latter in white schools solely upon age. Without investigation or inquiry, they began to attribute to "adult" Japanese

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school-boys a low moral standard and corrupting influence. The Berkeley Gazette, for example, asked: "Is there a power lodged anywhere in the universe. that may oblige our young children to associate with men, in or out of school, who are not up to our standard of morals?" It might pertinently be asked, perhaps, whether the standard of morals