Ancestors: A NovelAtherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn
General
Ancestors: A Novel
Atherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn
British -- United States -- Fiction; California -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Love stories; Political fiction
"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 going to be Japan for the Japanese. Well, now the sooner they know
that it's California for the Californians the better it will be for all
hands. We don't go round lookin' for trouble, but if it comes our way we
don't mind it one little bit. We'll tolerate the Japs just in so far as
we find them useful, and useful they are as servants; for if they don't
hold a candle to the old Chinee, they're a long sight better than our
lazy high-toned hired girls, who are good for just exactly nothing; and
we need a certain amount of them for hire in other fields; but as
citizens, not much. We've put a stop to that right here, in this county
at least; and so, Mr. Gwynne, that's the milk in the cocoanut, and we
hope that you'll see things our way, and not sell any of your land to
the Japs."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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