Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. IV.djvu/158

122 LIVES OF THE ^RESIDENTS Island, it is out of the question that the Island should remain independent." This message also referred to another piece of unstable equilibrium in our foreign relations namely, the issue between the United States Government and the State of California as regards Japan. The question is thirty years old. California Jias objected to the coming of Asiatics to settle. Her objection has not always been based on the same grounds; Oriental immorality and racial incom patibility have been alleged; but a famous line in a famous poem, "We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor" probably hits the truth. However they may differ from us in morals or in other traits, the Asiatics are more thrifty, more industrious, more efficient as laborers, and can live on less than Americans. One Chinese or Japanese servant in a house does the work of two or three servants of other nationalities, and it is the same with out-door labor. This has been true ever since George Wash ington characterized the American farmer as the most shiftless and wasteful that he knew. But California s contention that her state is for her own people and not for aliens, be they better or worse than native citizens, is not easily answered. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1881. No other Asiatics were then considered. This is not the place to narrate the long and complicated story of the agitation, or the hand which the labor