Life — June 5, 1913 — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

JUNES. 1913 ‘While there is Life there's Hope’ No, i997 Published by LIFE PUBLISHING J. A, MitcumLL. Pres't. COM PAN’ COMPANY 4. sunuuxn, Seo'y and Treas. 17 West Thirty-first Street, New York English Offices, Cannon House. OWEVER mad the il- lustrious Japa- nese may be about the action of the California Legislature in denying them the right to own farms, they have no call to feel injured by it in their self- esteem. The California objection to the Japs is not as it seems apt to ap- pear in Nippon, an evidence of despise, but very considerably an evidence of respect. It is a good deal like the ob- jection to the Jews, because they are too clever in competition to be desir- able neighbors. But the Jews have never been troublesome as farmers. And there are other differences. The Jews become Americans, but it is un- thinkable that a Jap should be any- thing but Japanese. East is East and West is West, And never the twain may meet. That's the main trouble, and that is a trouble with Jews, too, though they are a long, long distance from home in time. It would be nice if the Jews should develop a strong proclivity for agri- culture and show what their industry and talent could do in that direction, for we need more farmers in the East. And this being a large country, if the three thousand Japanese farmers now in California would like to experiment with agriculture in the Eastern States there is land to spare for them and few questions asked. But they are not suited to be Ameri- can voters. It is not that they are not good enough, but that they are utterly Breas Bidgs., London, E. C. different, and because their duty is not here, but in Asia, and because our duty is not to assimilate Asia, but Europe. And that is a large enough duty in all conscience, and one sufficiently variegated to satisfy even Futurist art, and how it is going anybody can guess, but nobody really knows M's JANE ADDAMS—the Ad- mirable Miss Addams—has an admirable piece in the June number of the Ladies’ Home Journal, in which she imagines what the women would say to the men if the women had all the votes and the men came asking to share them. It as an amusing piece. She starts with a Utopian country, woman-governed, in which things have been properly managed in all the de- tails that the social service workers care for, and there are no factory troubles, no preventable industrial evils, no white- slaves,.no needless wars and no waste of money in armament. She makes the woman managers of this ideal country deprecate the desire of the men to participate in government on the ground of the great defects of man- agement in such man-governed coun- tries as America, and of the very fool- ish things that men like to do. That is Miss Addams’s familiar method. She always has in mind an ideal woman full of wisdom and kind- ness, whom she offers for comparison with the exceedingly fallible men that we know and are, and begs permission for her perfect woman to come in and correct the governmental errors of the faulty men. Whereas, in real life where all the men and all the women are fallible together, how differ- ent it is! She makes her women chide the men for spending ten million dollars on a battleship “out of sheer vain- glory,” and reminds them that “every time a gun is fired on a battleship, it explodes seventeen hundred dollars, yet you would be firing of these guns as mere salutes simply because you so enjoy the sound of shooting.” We don’t know the facts about the cost of big-gun salutes, but we will bet Miss Addams a new hat against a box of cigarettes that noise is at least ten times cheaper than she thinks. And is it not California, where women vote, that is making it, just now, something more than a matter of mere vain-glory for Uncle Sam to have ten-million- dollar battleships in his maritime stable? Miss Addams, arguing for votes for women to give them power to reform society, is herself a most persuasive example that votes are not necessary for the highest usefulness in that direc- tion, Fifteen or twenty million men have a vote in our country, but of them all not a score, not a dozen have been so effectual in bettering the conditions of life as she has been without a vote. One is tempted to say that ten thou- sand women like her in the United States would bring on a social millen- nium. But that might not be. It might bring on a collapse of reform, for ten thousand leaders would probably be an embarrassment to any cause. There is not room for many great leaders; not room in the papers and magazines for what they all have to say, nor room even in the Bull Moose conventions for all of them to lead. © TE sale of Harper's Weekly will sit somewhat ill on the hearts of some people who are used to this world as it has been, and hate to see its fix- tures disarrangeu. The Harper estab- lishment in Franklin Square is one of comicbooks.com