o curb our appetites and train our brains and enlarge our hearts
till we are something bigger and finer and numerically greater than this
yellow peril. We can't take it and pick it up and push it into the sea.
We are not Germans and we are not Turks. I never wanted anything in all
this world worse than I want to see you graduate ahead of Oka Sayye. And
then I want to see the white boys and girls of Canada and of England and
of Norway and Sweden and Australia, and of the whole world doing exactly
what I am recommending that you do in your class and what I am doing
personally in my own. I have had Japs in my classes ever since I have
been in school, but Father always told me to study them, to play the
game fairly, but to BEAT them in some way, in some fair way, to beat
them at the game they are undertaking."

"Well, there is one thing you don't take into consideration," said
Donald. "All of us did not happen to be fathered by Alexander Strong.
Maybe we haven't all got your brains."

"Oh, posher!" said Linda. "I know of a case where a little Indian was
picked up from a tribal battlefield in South America and brought to this
country and put into our schools, and there was nothing that any
white pupil in the school could do that he couldn't, so long as it was
imitative work. You have got to be constructive. You have got to work
out some way to get ahead of them; and if you will take the history
of the white races and go over their great achievements in mechanics,
science, art, literature--anything you choose--when a white man is
constructive, when he does create, he can simply cut circles around
the colored races. The thing is to get the boys and girls of today to
understand what is going on in the world, what they must do as their
share in making the world safe for their grandchildren. Life is a
struggle. It always has been. It always will be. There is no better
study than to go into the canyons or the deserts and efface yourself
and watch life. It's an all-day process of the stronger annihilating
the weaker. The one inexorable thing in the world is Nature. The eagle
dominates the hawk; the hawk, the falcon; the falcon, the raven; and
so on down to the place where the hummingbird drives the moth from his
particular trumpet flower. The big snake swallows the little one. The
big bear appropriates the desirable cave."

"And is that what you are recommending people to do?"

"No," said Linda, "it is not. That is wild. We go a