YELLOW RACE ACQUISITIONS.

Southland Times, Issue 18853, 19 June 1920, Page 8

YELLOW RACE ACQUISITIONS.

Mr Haggitt records that there are 90,000 Japanese in California; that they own many farms and hotels, and a big proportion of the apartment houses; while they own so much of the potato crop as to have practically cornered the market. They were selling when he left at 6d per pound, and in the restaurants placards requested diners not to ask for potatoes. He found also that many Chinese owned hotels, and while not themselves conducting the places, hired themselves as house attendants, chamber men, and the like, so as to have an eye on the management. BEST AND WORST ROADS. As to the roads, of which we have heard so much, Mr Haggitt sums them up as the best and the worst roads in the world. They specialise in main highways—there are 1400 miles of concrete roads in Southern California alone—but where they are not concrete or paved they are just mud. In San Diego, a town of 90,000 inhabitants, you could run round a corner from a paved street into a street of sticky mud, from which a car would have to be dug out; /and this within a quarter mile of the Post j Office. On ihe main highways, however, travel was delightful, and the motor cars run cheaper than the railway, with benzine at only Is a gallon. HUNDRED DAYS’ RACE MEETING.

Much else of interest Mr Haggitt had to say—of the prevalence of violent crime, with a comparative absence of petty larceny, so that though properties are unfenced trespass is slight; of the wonderful fruit orchards extending for stretches of 50 miles. But a fitting end of a narrative of this country of strange paradoxes—liquor forbidden and drug habits catered for, racing penalised, and graft capitalised—may be made with Mr Haggitt’s summary of a 100 days’ race meeting, organised just over the Mexican border, where all the liquor had been dumped, and was selling at XBd a "spot” (about a tablespoonful was a fair mouthful for the price). As a preliminary to attending these races, Mr Haggitt says, everyone in town was looking to buy a “gun.” Some fun was expected; as to whether it eventuated he is silent. But he found there all the concomitants of such fun—gambling hells and liquor galore. It was, however, the totalisator system that practically intrigued him. There were three totalisators—at one you backed a horse to win; at a second you backed him for a place (first and second payed a dividend) ; at the third you backed a horse for a show —first, second, and third paid a dividend. Whether or not that race meeting ran its allotted span Mr Haggitt cannot say, and the cables have not vouchsafed "sports” that interesting information. At any rate it started on January 24, and was still running merrily when Mr Haggitt sailed in April.