by Jesse
F. Steiner, is an attempt to study this phenomenon of race prejudice and
national egotism, so far as it reveals itself in the relations of the
Japanese and the Americans in this country, and to estimate the role it
is likely to play in the future relations of the two countries.

So far as I know, an investigation of precisely this nature has not
hitherto been made. One reason for this is, perhaps, that not until very
recent times did the problem present itself in precisely this form. So
long as the nations lived in practical isolation, carrying on their
intercourse through the medium of professional diplomats, and knowing
each other mainly through the products they exchanged, census reports,
and the discreet observations of polite travelers, racial prejudice did
not disturb international relations. With the extension of international
commerce, the increase of immigration, and the interpenetration of
peoples, the scene changes. The railway, the steamship, and the
telegraph are rapidly mobilizing the peoples of the earth. The nations
are coming out of their isolation, and distances which separated the
different races are rapidly giving way before the extension of
communication.

The same human motives which have led men to spread a network of
trade-communication over the whole earth in order to bring about an
exchange of commodities are now bringing about a new distribution of
populations. When these populations become as mobile as the commodities
of commerce, there will be practically no limits--except those
artificial barriers, like the customs and immigration restrictions,
maintained by individual states--to a world-wide economic and personal
competition. Furthermore when the natural barriers are broken down,
artificial barriers will be maintained with increasing difficulty.

Some conception of the extent of the changes which are taking place in
the world under the influence of these forces may be gathered from the
fact that in 1870 the cost of transporting a bushel of grain in Europe
was so great as to prohibit its sale beyond a radius of two hundred
miles from a primary market. By 1883 the importation of grains from the
virgin soil of the western prairies in the United States had brought
about an agricultural crisis in every country in western Europe.

One may illustrate, but it is scarcely possible to estimate, the
economic changes which have been brought about by the enormous increase
in ocean transpor