"I know a white apologist for the Japanese who in a million pamphlets
and from a thousand rostrums has cried that it is false that Japanese
women labor in the fields," Farrel told his guests. "You have seen a
thousand of them laboring in this valley. Hundreds of them carry
babies on their backs or set them to sleep on a gunnysack between the
rows of vegetables. There is a sixteen-year-old girl struggling with a
one-horse cultivator, while her sisters and her mother hold up their
end with five male Japs in the gentle art of hoeing potatoes."
"They live in wretched little houses," Kay ventured to remark.
"Anything that will shelter a horse or a chicken is a palace to a Jap,
Kay. The furnishings of their houses are few and crude. They rise in
the morning, eat, labor, eat, and retire to sleep against another day
of toil. They are all growing rich in this valley, but have you seen
one of these aliens building a decent home, or laying out a flower
garden? Do you see anything inspiring or elevating to our nation due
to the influence of such a race?"
"Yonder is a schoolhouse," Mrs. Parker suggested. "Let us visit it."
"The American flag floats over that little red school-house, at any
rate," Parker defended.
William halted the car in the schoolhouse yard and Farrel got out and
walked to the schoolhouse door. An American school-teacher, a girl of
perhaps twenty, came to the door and met him with an inquiring look.
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