strously, and the far-seeing statesmen of both countries should join
to prevent it.

But this is not because either nation is inferior to the other; it is
because they are different. The two peoples represent two civilizations
which, although in many respects equally high, are so totally
distinct in their past history that it is idle to expect in one or two
generations to overcome this difference. One civilization is as old
as the other; and in neither case is the line of cultural descent
coincident with that of ethnic descent. Unquestionably the ancestors of
the great majority both of the modern Americans and the modern Japanese
were barbarians in that remote past which saw the origins of the
cultured peoples to which the Americans and the Japanese of to-day
severally trace their civilizations. But the lines of development of
these two civilizations, of the Orient and the Occident, have been
separate and divergent since thousands of years before the Christian
era; certainly since that hoary eld in which the Akkadian predecessors
of the Chaldean Semites held sway in Mesopotamia. An effort to mix
together, out of hand, the peoples representing the culminating points
of two such lines of divergent cultural development would be fraught
with peril; and this, I repeat, because the two are different, not
because either is inferior to the other. Wise statesmen, looking to the
future, will for the present endeavor to keep the two nations from mass
contact and intermingling, precisely because they wish to keep each in
relations of permanent good will and friendship with the other.

Exactly what was done in the particular crisis to which I refer is shown
in the following letter which, after our policy had been successfully
put into execution, I sent to the then Speaker of the California lower
house of the Legislature:

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, February 8, 1909.

HON P. A. STANTON, Speaker of the Assembly, Sacramento, California:

I trust there will be no misunderstanding of the Federal Government's
attitude. We are jealously endeavoring to guard the interests of
California and of the entire West in accordance with the desires of our
Western people. By friendly agreement with Japan, we are now carrying
out a policy which, while meeting the interests and desires of the
Pacific slope, is yet compatible, not merely with mutual self-respect,
but with mutual esteem and admiration between the Americans and
Japanese. The Japanes