Page:Disapproving Anti-Japanese Agitation.djvu/9

 production, encouraging idleness and putting a penalty on industry. It will take very powerful and drastic legislation to protect the indolent against the competition of the industrious, and the success of such legislation would mean the failure of our nation and our race. We are courting failure, we are hastening the decadence of our nation when, instead of matching industry with industry and increasing our efforts to gather her treasures from the earth by efficient and intelligent labor, we choose to live upon accumulated wealth and reduce work to a minimum. The argument against Japanese exclusion is an argument in favor of encouraging feebleness in ourselves instead of strength.

The only other point in the economic view that I wish to touch upon is that the prosperity of this country is largely dependent upon its foreign trade. Commercial relations between individuals in the two countries are of the friendliest character. Portland and the coast generally are offering every inducement to the Japanese to deal with us. We are now striving to persuade them to send their steamers to this port. The imports into the United States from Japan rose from $208,000,000 in 1917 to $304,000,000 in 1919, our exports from $54,000,000 in 1914 to $130,000,000 in 1917, and $326,000,000 in 1919, and we are bending all our energies to the further increase of this mutually satisfactory business. Is it good economics to treat these clients in such fashion as to induce them to turn the current of this vast and growing reciprocal trade into other channels? And supposing that present conditions are unsatisfactory to us, is it good policy to try and change them by a campaign of vilification and abuse? Wouldn't it be better to approach a friendly nation in a friendly way, and suggest a modification of existing agreements? I think I am safe in saying that Japan values the friendship of the United States so highly that she will make any reasonable concession to meet the views of our people. When a few years ago it appeared that a certain proposed treaty of arbitration between Great Britain and the United States was in conflict with the conditions of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, it was at Japan's request that the term's of that covenant were so modified as to permit the enactment of our treaty of arbitration. "This," says Colonel Roosevelt, "was Japan's contribution to universal peace." And if we