unable to trust Japanese
labor, unable to endure Japanese neighbors or to enter into Japanese
social life weary of paying taxes to support schools for the education
of Japanese children, weary of daily contact with irritable, unreliable
and unassimilable aliens, sold or leased their farms in order to escape
into a white neighborhood. I presume, Mr. Parker, that nobody can
realize the impossibility of withstanding this yellow flood except
those who have been overwhelmed by it. We humanitarians of a later day
gaze with gentle sympathy upon the spectacle of a noble and primeval
race like the Iroquois tribe of Indians dying before the advance of our
Anglo-Saxon civilization, but with characteristic Anglo-Saxon
inconsistency and stupidity we are quite loth to feel sorry for
ourselves, doomed to death before the advance of a Mongolian
civilization unless we put a stop to it--forcibly and immediately!"
"Let us go down and see for ourselves," Mrs. Parker suggested.
Having reached the floor of the valley, at Farrel's suggestion they
drove up one side of it and down the other. Motor-truck after
motor-truck, laden with crated vegetables, passed them on the road,
each truck driven by a Japanese, some of them wearing the peculiar
bamboo hats of the Japanese coolie class.
The valley was given over to vegetable farming and the fields were
dotted with men, women and children, squatting on their heels between
the rows or bending over them in an attitude which they seemed able to
maintain indefinitely, but which would have broken the back of a white
man.
"I know a white apologist for the Japanese who in a million pamphlets
and from a thousand rostrums has cried that it is false that Japanese
women labor in the fields," Farrel told his guests. "You have seen a
thousand of them laboring in this valley. Hundreds of them carry
babies on their backs or set them to sleep on a gunnysack between the
rows of vegetables. There is a sixteen-year-old girl struggling with a
one-horse cultivator, while her sisters and her mother hold up their
end with five male Japs in the gentle art of hoeing potatoes."
"They live in wretched little houses," Kay ventured to remark.
"Anything that will shelter a horse or a chicken is a palace to a Jap,
Kay. The furnishings of their houses are few and crude. They rise in
the morning, eat, labor, eat, and retire to sleep against another day
of toil. They are all growing rich in this valley, but hav
|