"It appears," the girl suggested, "that all these ancient national
brags come home, like curses, to roost."

"Indeed they do, Miss Parker! But to get on with our shibboleths. We
hear a great deal of twaddle about the law of the survival of the
fittest. I'm willing to abide by such a natural law, provided the
competition is confined to mine own people--and I'm one of those chaps,
who, to date, has failed to survive. But I cannot see any common sense
in opening the lists to Orientals. We Californians know we cannot win
in competition with them." He paused and glanced at Kay. "Does all
this harangue bore you, Miss Parker?"

"Not at all. Are there any more shibboleths?"

"I haven't begun to enumerate them. Take, for instance, that old
pacifist gag, that Utopian dream that is crystallized in the words:
'The road to universal peace.' All the long years when we were not
bothered by wars or rumors of wars, other nations were whittling each
other to pieces. And these agonized neighbors, longing, with a great
longing, for world-peace, looked to the United States as the only
logical country in which a great cure-all for wars might reasonably be
expected to germinate. So their propagandists came to our shores and
started societies looking toward the establishment of brotherly love,
and thus was born the shibboleth of universal peace, with Uncle Sam
heading the parade like an old bell-mare in a pack train. What these
peace-patriots want is peace at any price, although they do not
advertise the fact. We proclaim to the world that we are a Christian
nation. _Ergo_, we must avoid trouble. The avoidance of trouble is
the policy of procrastinators, the vacillating, and the weak. For one
cannot avoid real trouble. It simply will not be avoided;