States possessions on the Pacific had grown too valuable to be guarded
by a navy ten thousand miles away around the Horn. True, Roosevelt
sent the fleet around the world to show what it could do, and the
country howled its jubilation over the fact. But the Little Brown
Brother only smiled; for the fleet hadn't coal to steam five hundred
miles without hiring foreign colliers to follow around with supply of
fuel. "Fine fleet! To be sure we have the ships," exploded a rear
admiral in San Diego Bay a few years ago; "but look here!" He pointed
through the port at an insignificant coaling dock such as third-rate
barges use. "See any coal?" he asked. "If trouble should come"--it
was just after the flight of Diaz--"we haven't coal enough to go
half-way up or down the coast."

II

Sometimes we can guess the game from the moves of the chess players.
With facts for chessmen, what are the moves?

It was up in Atlin, British Columbia, a few years after the Klondike
rush. Five hundred Japs had come tumbling into the mining camp,
seemingly from nowhere, in reality from Japanese colonies in Hawaii.
The white miners warned the Japs that "it wouldn't be a healthy camp,"
but mine owners were desperate for workers. Wages ran at from five to
ten dollars a day. The Japs were located in a camp by themselves and
put to work. On dynamite work, for which the white man was paid five
to ten dollars, the Jap was paid three and five dollars. Still he held
on with his teeth, "dogged as does it," as he always does. Suddenly
the provincial board of health was notified. There was a lot of
sickness in the Jap camp--"filthy conditions," the mine owners
reported. The board of health found traces of arsenical poisoning in
all the Jap maladies. The Japs decamped as if by magic.

Simultaneously there broke out from Alaska to Monterey the anti-Jap,
anti-Chinese, anti-Hindu agitation. California's exclusion and land
laws became party planks. British Columbia got round it by a
subterfuge. She had the Ottawa government rush through an
order-in-council known as "the direct passage" law. All Orientals at
that time were coming in by way of Hawaii. Ships direct from India
were not sailing. They stopped at Hong Kong and Hawaii. The
order-in-council was to forbid the entrance of Brown Brothers unless in
direct passage from their own land. That effectually barred the Hindu
out, till recently when a Japanese line, to test the Direct Passag