(The Crimson invites all men in the University to submit signed communications of timely interest. It assumes no responsibility, however, for sentiments expressed under this head and reserves the right to exclude any whose publication would be palpably inappropriate.)

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Your editorial of November 8th on the subject of the anti-Japanese legislation in California concludes, "It is inexcusable for the California 'scare-mongers' to bend their efforts thus toward embroiling the United States in a dangerous foreign tangle." Since the "scare-mongers" of whom you speak constitute about three-quarters of the people of California it is possible that some excuse might be found for their action.

From a point of view other than yours, California has done a thing which will go far to prevent the United States from becoming embroiled in the dangerous foreign tangle which you fear. It has called the nation's attention to a situation which cannot be allowed to continue if we are to remain at peace with Japan. The very fact, which you cite, that the California anti-Japanese legislation violates our present treaty with Japan and conflicts with the Fourteenth Amendment is evidence that the problem, is a vital one and must be solved by the Federal Government. California has placed the nation in a position where it must act. It is far better to decide now what shall be the attitude of the United States toward this unique class of Oriental immigration than to allow the question to go unsettled in the face of the rising racial hatred of the people of the Pacific Coast.

The attitude of the New England states toward this California problem is analogous to their attitude toward the South for the several decades immediately after the Civil War. They do not see why two utterly different and incompatible racial groups cannot lie down together like lambs. The fact of race hatred, like any other of the irrational and abstractedly reprehensible dispositions of man, cannot be wished or argued away. In order that this fact may appear it is necessary that the incompatible races should be actually in contact, working and competing with one another. It appears in the West for this reason. It appeared in the South after the Civil War between the negroes and whites for the same reason. And this, too, is why New England has been in both cases incapable of appreciating the problem concretely. New England has had no experience either of negro hatred or of Japanese hatred. From the angle of the New England observer these passions appear bad and groundless and jingoistic. But they exist and will always exist and grow when two races so widely separated by religion, tradition, custom and morality as the American and the Japanese are placed in close social and economic relations.

If the Japanese are allowed to increase by birth and by illegal infiltration as rapidly as they are now increasing in California, the fire of race antagonism will burst into a much more dangerous flame than has yet been the case. When violence, lynching, anti-Japanese Ku Klux Klans, and race-riots make their appearance in the West, as they no doubt will if the Japanese are allowed to take possession of the land and the work which the American considers his by racial right, we shall have a situation much more dangerous to international peace than the present slight wound to Japanese sensibilities.

The California legislation, like the "grandfather clauses" of some Southern States, may be in conflict with the spirit and letter of some fundamental clauses of the Constitution, but they deal with emergencies which that document was not designed to meet specifically, but only generally and abstractly. They are attempts at a peaceful settlement of pressing racial problems. And the Californians, far from being "scare-mongers," have done their proper part towards forcing the nation to settle a question of whose gravity few people outside of California are aware. The Californians are distinctly on the side of peace. RALPH M. EATON, Instr. November 8, 1920.