"But the pure descendants of the Japanese immigrants may surely change and become real Americans," I hear somebody saying. Meanwhile, we have just been informed that the son of German parents in Cincinnati, who had accepted a Captain-Surgeon's commission in our army and gone to France had not been perfectly Americanized. The fellow was hanged for inoculating our soldiers with disease germs instead of typhoid serum. This creature was born and reared not in the United States, but in the German section of Cincinnati. With this in mind we expect to Americanize the Japanese, the very breath of whose intense religious emotion is the sacred worship of their absolute and august ruler, the Mikado! Be it a million Russians or a million Japanese, a million Italians or a million French-Canadians--either their importation or their birth upon our soil prevents by the stifling force of economic competition the birth of a million Americans. In the name of Almighty God and our country, what has become of our brains? These facts are enough to make any of us not totally bereft of his senses to go into the highways and the byways crying for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, or if some man has a better plan for safeguarding the nation conjuring him in God's name to proclaim it. CHAPTER XIV The Racial Limitations of Democracy Democracy is the practice of self-government by the people. It is the rule of law instead of persons; of the majority instead of the minority or individual. As a system both of government and social life it has but recently been either widely accepted in theory or established in practice. A short three hundred years mark its very real advance in the modern world. Only during the past hundred years has majority rule been accepted as desirable or possible among a very few of the more advanced countries. If we examine the political map of the world we find that the triumphs of democracy are limited to but a few nations. We may generalize by observing that a very few nations have but recently succeeded in making democracy work. What part is democracy likely to play in various quarters of the world during our present century? Are we to see, now that Europe and Asia are torn from end to end by revolutions, a sudden adaptation of all these backward peoples to the democratic method? All recognize that we are just now going through one of the greatest of revolutionary periods in history. Maybe the millenium of universal freedom and democracy is even now at hand. Let us see.