n have
other ambitions, there are plenty of good European immigrants, and it
is our business to encourage them. We assimilate anything white so
quickly it is a wonder an immigrant remembers the native way of
pronouncing his own name. But the Oriental we can't assimilate, for all
our ostrich-like digestion, and what we can't assimilate we won't have.
It is also true that we don't like the Jap. He antagonizes us with his
ill-concealed impertinence under a thin veneer of servility; and
superior as he is, still he has a colored skin. Now, right or wrong,
Christian or merely natural, we despise and dislike colored blood, every
decent man of us in this United States of America. Your sentimentalists
can come over and wonder and write about us, reproach us and do their
honest ingenuous best to convert us, it never will make _one damned bit
of difference_. We are as we are and that is the end of it. The
antagonism, of course, only leaps to life when the colored man wants
equal rights and recognition, something he will never get in the United
States of America, as long as the stripes and the stars wave over it;
and the sooner the sentimentalists quit holding out false hopes the
better. As to the Chinese, it is quite true that there was no objection
to them outside of politics. And the reason was, they kept their place.
The antipathy to the Japanese extends throughout all classes. Every
thinking man in the State is concerned with the question. California
will be overrun with them before we know where we are; and we are hoping
that other counties will give an ear to the wisdom and farsightedness
Mr. Boutts has displayed, in proposing that no more land shall be
sold--or rented--to the Japanese. They can work for us if we have need
of them, for a while, but they cannot settle."

Gwynne had been thinking rapidly as Judge Leslie drawled out his
homily. In his new apprehension of latent weaknesses in his character he
was indisposed to yield to pressure, but he was equally desirous not to
let the turmoil into which his inner life had been thrown lead him to
any ridiculous extremes; not only interfering with his prospects, but
converting himself into chaos. He was extremely anxious to make no
mistakes at the outset of his new career, beset with difficulties
enough. Their words had every appearance of being a just presentment of
a just cause. He didn't care a hang about the "Jap." For the matter of
that, he reflected with some bitterness,