no labor-unions here. But," he added bitterly, "you could throw a
stone in the air and be moderately safe on the small end of a bet that
the stone would land on a Jap farmer."

"Do the white farmers think that sign will frighten them away?"

"No; of course not. That sign is merely a polite intimation to white
men who may contemplate selling or leasing their lands to Japs that the
organized sentiment of this community is against such a course. The
lower standards of living of the Oriental enable him to pay much higher
prices for land than a white man can."

"But," she persisted, "these aliens have a legal right to own and lease
land in this state, have they not?"

"Unfortunately, through the treachery of white lawyers, they have
devised means to comply with the letter of a law denying them the right
to own land, while evading the spirit of that law. Corporations with
white dummy directors--purchases by alien Japs in the names of their
infants in arms who happen to have been born in this country--" he
shrugged.

"Then you should amend your laws."

He looked at her with the faintest hint of cool belligerence in his
fine dark eyes.

"Every time we Californians try to enact a law calculated to keep our
state a white man's country, you Easterners, who know nothing of our
problem, and are too infernally lazy to read up on it, permit