r service for the community for which his natural
disposition and aptitude fit him, irrespective of race or "previous
condition."

Finally, caste and the limitation of economic opportunity is contrary,
if not to our traditions, at least to our political principles. That
means that there will always be an active minority opposed to any
settlement based on the caste system as applied to either the black or
the brown races, on grounds of political sentiment. This minority will
be small in parts of the country immediately adversely affected by the
competition of the invading race. It will be larger in regions which are
not greatly affected. It will be increased if immigration is so rapid as
to make the competition more acute. We must look to other measures for
the solution of the Japanese problem, if it should prove true, as seems
probable, that we are not able or, for various reasons, do not care
permanently to hold back the rising tide of the oriental invasion.

I have said that fundamentally and in principle prejudice against the
Japanese in America today was identical with the prejudice which
attaches to any immigrant people. There is, as Mr. Steiner has pointed
out, a difference. This is due to the existence in the human mind of a
mechanism by which we inevitably and automatically classify every
individual human being we meet. When a race bears an external mark by
which every individual member of it can infallibly be identified, that
race is by that fact set apart and segregated. Japanese, Chinese, and
Negroes cannot move among us with the same freedom as the members of
other races because they bear marks which identify them as members of
their race. This fact isolates them. In the end the effect of this
isolation, both in its effects upon the Japanese themselves and upon the
human environment in which they live, is profound. Isolation is at once
a cause and an effect of race prejudice. It is a vicious
circle--isolation, prejudice; prejudice, isolation. Were there no other
reasons which urge us to consider the case of the Japanese and the
oriental peoples in a category different from that of the European
immigrant, this fact, that they are bound to live in the American
community a more or less isolated life, would impel us to do so.

In conclusion, I may perhaps say in a word what seems to me the
practical bearing of Mr. Steiner's book. Race prejudice is a mechanism
of the group mind which acts reflexly and automatic