Raises A World Question.

New York Times 100 years ago today, May 20, 1913:
California Tangle Leads to Grave Issues, Says a London Writer,
By Marconi Transatlantic Wireless Telegraph to The New York Times.
    LONDON, May 19.— Sir Valentine Chirol, Director of The Times's foreign department, has a three-column article in that newspaper, dealing with the issues which lie at the back of the differences between the United States and Japan. Sir Valentine, who regards the California matter as serious, says:
    "It threatens to force to a definite issue a question which diplomacy has hitherto been at pains to elude by a series of skillful compromises.
    "The ultimate issue involved is, in fact, whether Japan, who made good her title to be treated on a footing of complete equality as one of the great powers of the world, is not also entitled to rank among the civilized nations, whose citizens the American Republic is ready to welcome, subject to a few well-defined exceptions, within its fold, whenever they are prepared to transfer their allegiance to it, or whether her people are to be individually subject to the disabilities, imposed upon Asiatics collectively, whose lower plane of civilization is held to justify their exclusion from the enjoyment of rights freely accorded to all those who come with European credentials.
    "Such an issue, whether it be raised in the law courts or through diplomatic channels, will have to be met and dealt with on equally broad grounds."
    After pointing but that probably a majority of the Japanese emigrants are superior to many of those who swarm to the United States from Eastern Europe, the writer says:
    "If the right of naturalization is to be denied all the Japanese, it cannot be on the ground that every Japanese is personally more undesirable as a citizen than any European. The color bar cannot very logically be pleaded as in itself prohibitive by a State which within living memory has waged the greatest civil war of modern times in order to establish the claim of American negroes to equal rights of citizenship with the white population of the Republic.
    "Then again the number of mixed marriages between Japanese and Europeans are no doubt still very small, but they are increasing, and it would be easy to name several Japanese in high positions who have set the example. Could the color bar be maintained also against the offspring of such unions?
    "Even less can religion be operative to bar them, for there are already considerable Christian communities in Japan.
    "Nor could any educational bar be sustained. There is no branch of science, art, or letters in which the Japanese have not shown themselves capable of acquiring proficiency, while in some they have already earned conspicuous distinction."
    Sir Valentine concludes that the bar of race would seem the only one which could be plausibly maintained, and asks whether such a bar must be permanent. He goes on:
    "Japan was too long bound up with Asia by geographical propinquity and by the traditions of her own ancient civilization to repudiate her Asiatic descent. A question, which she may raise with much greater propriety, is whether her Asiatic descent is permanently to disqualify her from enjoying the full rights freely accorded one another by the great nations into whose company she has already gained entrance on a footing of complete political equality. Her argument would presumably be:
    "'Modern civilization is not a matter of longitude or latitude, of race or creed. Japan has based upon it her laws and institutions. She has confined her national life to it. In so far as the term Asiatic means active or passive antagonism to the influences of modern civilization, Japan has ceased to be an Asiatic nation. If her practice sometimes fall short of principle, if her people do not all tread in the new paths with equal readiness, let those nations cast stones at her who never lapse from the high standards they pride themselves on having set up and whose entire organism is free from blemish.'"