"Confounded heavy things!" you will say to yourself.  "Thank goodness
I've got rid of them. Let him have the fun of dragging them about
these ghastly roads. See how he likes the job!"

   War is a ridiculous method of settling disputes. Anything that can
tend to make its ridiculous aspect more apparent is to be welcomed.
The new school of military dispatch-writers may succeed in turning
even the laughter of the mob against it.

   The present trouble in the East would never have occurred but for the
white man's enthusiasm for bearing other people's burdens. What we
call the yellow danger is the fear that the yellow man may before
long request us, so far as he is concerned, to put his particular
burden down. It may occur to him that, seeing it is his property, he
would just as soon carry it himself. A London policeman told me a
story the other day that struck him as an example of Cockney humour
under trying circumstances. But it may also serve as a fable. From
a lonely street in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden, early one
morning, the constable heard cries of "Stop thief!" shouted in a
childish treble. He arrived on the scene just in time to collar a
young hooligan, who, having snatched a basket of fruit from a small
lad—a greengrocer's errand boy, as it turned out—was, with it,
making tracks. The greengrocer's boy, between panting and tears,
delivered his accusation. The hooligan regarded him with an
expression of amazed indignation.

   "What d'yer mean, stealing it?" exclaimed Mr. Hooligan.  "Why, I was
carrying it for yer!"

   The white man has got into the way of "carrying" other people's
burdens, and now it looks as if the yellow man were going to object
to our carrying his any further. Maybe he is going to get nasty, and
insist on carrying it himself. We call this "the yellow danger."

   A friend of mine—he is a man who in the street walks into lamp-
posts, and apologises—sees rising from the East the dawn of a new
day in the world's history. The yellow danger is to him a golden
hope. He sees a race long stagnant, stretching its giant limbs with
the first vague movements of returning life. He is a poor sort of
patriot; he calls himself, I suppose, a white man, yet he shamelessly

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