he world, and forced them into new intimacies and
new forms of competition, rivalry, and conflict.

Since 1870 the conditions which I have attempted to sketch have steadily
forced upon America and the nations of Europe the problem of
assimilating their heterogeneous populations. What we call the race
problem is at once an incident of this process of assimilation and an
evidence of its failure.

The present volume, _The Japanese Invasion: A Study in the Psychology of
Inter-racial Contact_, touches but does not deal with the general
situation which I have briefly sketched. It is, as its title suggests, a
study in "racial contacts," and is an attempt to distinguish and trace
to their sources the attitudes and the sentiments--that is to say,
mutual prejudices--which have been and still are a source of mutual
irritation and misunderstanding between the Japanese and American
peoples.

Fundamentally, prejudice against the Japanese in the United States is
merely the prejudice which attaches to every alien and immigrant people.
The immigrant from Europe, like the immigrant from Asia, comes to this
country because he finds here a freedom of individual action and an
economic opportunity which he did not find at home. It is an instance of
the general tendency of populations to move from an area of relatively
closed, to one of relatively open, resources. The movement is as
inevitable and, in the long run, as resistless as that which draws water
from its mountain sources to the sea. It is one way of redressing the
economic balance and bringing about an economic equilibrium.

The very circumstances under which this modern movement of population
has arisen implies then that the standard of living, if not the cultural
level, of the immigrant is lower than that of the native population. The
consequence is that immigration brings with it a new and disturbing form
of competition, the competition, namely, of peoples of a lower and of a
higher standard of living. The effect of this competition, where it is
free and unrestricted, is either to lower the living standards of the
native population; to expel them from the vocations in which the
immigrants are able or permitted to compete; or what may, perhaps, be
regarded as a more sinister consequence, to induce such a restriction of
the birth rate of the native population as to insure its ultimate
extinction. The latter is, in fact, what seems to be happening in the
New England manufacturing