orth. So we just
hoped that as you have come to live among us you could be brought to see
things from our point of view."

He scraped his chair forward and dropped his voice confidentially, at
the same time darting a sharp glance through the open window beside him.
"It's this Japanese business. The Chinese, back in the Seventies, was
not a patch on it, because the Chinee never aspired to be anything but
house servants, fruit pickers, vegetable raisers and vendors on a small
scale, and the like. The agitation against them which led to the
exclusion bill was wholly Irish; that is to say it was entirely a
working-class political agitation, because the Chinee was doing better
work for less money than the white man. The better class liked the
Chinee and have always regretted the loss of them; and to-day those who
are left, particularly cooks and workers on those big reclaimed islands
of the San Joaquin River, where they raise the best asparagus in the
world--yes, in the world, sir--get higher wages than any white man or
woman in the State.

"But these Japs are a different proposition. They're slack servants,
unless they happen to be a better sort than the majority, and that
unreliable you never know where you are with them. And being servants is
about the last ambition they've come for to this great and glorious
country. They're buyin' farms all up and down the rivers, the most
fertile land in the State, to say nothing of some of the interior
valleys. You see, there were big grants like Lumalitas at first over a
good part of California. Then the ranches of thousands of acres were cut
up and sold into farms of three or four hundred acres that paid like the
mischief so long as the old man stuck to business himself. This he
generally did; but times have changed, and now all the young men want to
go to town; and most of the big farms have been cut up into little ones
and sold off to immigrants and the like. Well, that's the Japs' lay.
They like things on a small scale and know how to wring a dollar out of
every five-cent piece. No one's denying they're smart. They slid in and
got a good grip before we thought them worth looking at. Now we're
saddled with about thirty thousand of them, and more coming on every
steamer from Honolulu and Japan. Some years ago when they began to find
themselves as a nation, and to rebel at the foreigners that were ruling
things through the open ports, they let it be pretty well known that it
was g