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The misfortune of success has never been better exemplified in the world's history than in the results which have followed from the White Man's attempt to arouse Japan to an appreciation of the blessings of European civilisation. Our fathers and grandfathers of the middle nineteenth century battered at the barred and picturesque doors of the land of the Mikado with a vague idea that there was plunder, trade or some other tangible benefit to be got from dragging the quaint Yellow Recluse out of his retirement. Without a foreboding, every civilised Power that had a fighting ship and the time to spare, took some part in urging Japan to awake and be modern. A great deal of gunpowder was burned before the little Asiatic nation stirred. Then she seemed in a flash to learn the whole lesson of our combative civilisation. Naval strategy; the forging of trade-marks; military organisation; appreciation of the value of cheap labour and of machinery in industry; aseptic surgery; resolute and cunning diplomacy—all these were suddenly added to the mental equipment of an Asiatic people, and all used in reprisal against Europe. To-day Japan is the greatest warrior Power in the Pacific, and is also a powerful factor in that war for markets which is not the least important manifestation of race rivalry. As sailors, soldiers, merchants and factory hands, the Japanese are unmistakably awake.

With a discipline impossible of achievement by a European race, the Japanese people pursued the methods of eclectic philosophy in their nation-making. They copied the best from the army systems of Germany and France: duplicated the British naval discipline: adopted what they thought most efficient of the industrial machinery of Europe and America, including a scientific tariff. Nothing that seemed likely to be of advantage was neglected. Even the question of religion was seriously considered, and these awakened people were at one time on the point of a simultaneous national adoption of some form of Christianity. But they were convinced on reflection that nothing of Europe's success in this world was due to religion; and, unconcerned for the moment with anything that was not of this world, decided to forbear from "scrapping" Shintoism and sending it to the rubbish heap where reposed the two-handled sword of the Sumarai.[2]

This miracle of the complete transformation of a race has been accomplished in half a century. Within the memory of some living people the Japanese were content with a secluded life on their hungry islands, where they painted dainty pictures, wove quaint and beautiful fabrics, cultivated children and flowers in a spirit of happy artistry, and pursued

war among themselves as a sport, with enthusiasm certainly, but without any excessive cruelty, if consideration be given to Asiatic ideas of death and the Asiatic degree of sensitiveness to torture. They were without any ideas of foreign conquest. The world had no respect for Japan then. Specimens of Japanese painting and pottery were admired by a few connoisseurs in little corners of the world (such as Bond Street, London), and that was all. Now, Japan having learned the art of modern warfare, we know also that the Japanese are great artists, great philosophers, great poets. Of a sudden a nation has jumped from being naturally chosen as the most absurd and harmless vehicle for a Gilbert satire to that of being "the honoured ally" of Great Britain, in respect to whose susceptibilities that satire should be suppressed.

But our belated respect for the artistry of the Japanese gives little, if any, explanation of the miracle of their sudden transformation. The Chinese are greater artists, greater philosophers, superior intellectually and physically. They heard at an even earlier date the same harsh summons from Europe to wake up. But it was neglected, and, whatever the outcome of the revolutionary movement now progressing, the Chinese are not yet a Power to be taken into present consideration as regards the Pacific Ocean or world-politics generally. The most patient search gives no certain guidance as to the causes of Japan's sudden advance to a position amongst the world's great nations. If we could accurately determine those causes it would probably give a valuable clue to the study of the psychology of races. But the effort is in vain. An analogy is often drawn between the Japanese and the British. Except that both were island races, there are few points of resemblance. The British islands, inhabited originally by the Gauls, had their human stock enriched from time to time by the Romans, the Danes, the Teutons, the Normans. The British type, in part Celtic, in part Roman, in part Danish, in part Anglo-Saxon, in part Norman, was naturally a hard-fighting, stubborn, adventurous race fitted for the work of exploration and colonisation.

But the Japanese had, so far as can be ascertained, little advantage from cross-breeding. Probably they were originally a Tartar race. The primitive inhabitants of the islands were ancestors of the Hairy Ainus, who still survive in small numbers. Like the aboriginals of Australia, the Ainus were a primitive rather than a degraded type, closely allied to the ancestors of the European races. Probably the Tartar invaders who colonised Japan came by way of Corea. But after their advent there was no new element introduced to give the human race in Japan a fresh stimulus; and that original Tartar stock, though vigorous and warlike, has never proved elsewhere any great capacity for organisation.

In the sixth century of the Christian Era, Chinese civilisation and the Buddhistic religion came to the Japanese, who at the time had about the same standard of culture as the Red Indians of the American continent when the Mayflower sailed. For some four centuries the Japanese island race was tributary to China, and during that time there was evolved a national religion, Shintoism, which probably represented the old Tartar faith modified by Chinese philosophy. In the eighth and subsequent centuries, Japan in its national organisation very closely resembled feudal Europe. As in Europe, there was a service tenure for the land; a system by which organised groups, or KO's, became answerable collectively for the deeds of each member of the group; and, as in feudal Europe, Church and State made rival claims to supreme power.

Indiscriminate fighting between rival feudal lords, a constant strife between the Shoguns, representing the priestly power, and the Mikados, representing the civil power, make up the islands' history for century after century. Through it all there is no gleam of light on the evolution of the latent powers which were to come to maturity, as in an hour, during the nineteenth century. Japan appeared to be an average example of a semi-civilised country which would never evolve to a much higher state because of the undisciplined quarrelsomeness of its people.

In the sixteenth century Europe first made the acquaintance of Japan. Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, British traders and explorers visited the country. St. Francis Xavier established missions there and baptized many in the Christian faith. After two centuries of general toleration, with intervals of welcome and yet other intervals of resolute massacre, in 1741 the last of the Europeans were ordered out of the islands, the Japanese having decided that they wanted neither the religion, the trade, nor the friendship of the White Man. The same prohibitions were applied at the same time to Chinese traders. A resolute policy of exclusiveness was adopted.

Japan seems to have learned absolutely nothing from her first contact with European civilisation. She settled down to the old policy of rigorous exclusiveness, and to a renewal of her tribal and religious warfare, in the midst of which, like a strange flower in a rocky cleft, flourished a dainty æstheticism. The nineteenth century thus dawned on Japan, a bitterly poor country, made poorer by the devotion of much of her energies to internal warfare and by the devotion of some of her scanty supply of good land to the cultivation of flowers instead of grain. The observer of the day could hardly have imagined more unpromising material for the making of the modern Japanese nation, organised with Spartan thoroughness for naval, military and industrial warfare.

The United States in 1853 led the way in the successful attempt of White civilisation to open up trade relations with Japan. The method was rude; and it was followed by resolute offers of "friendship," backed by armed threats, from Great Britain, France, Russia and Portugal. The Japanese wanted none of them. The feeling of the people was distinctly anti-foreign. They wished to be left to their flowers and their family feuds. But the White Man insisted. In 1864 a combination of Powers forced the Straits of Shimonoseki. The Japanese were compelled by these and other outrages to a feeling of national unity. In the face of a foreign danger domestic feuds were forgotten. By 1869 Japan had organised her policy on a basis which has kept internal peace ever since (with the exception of the revolt of the Satsuma in 1884), and she had resolved on fighting out with Russia the issue of supremacy in the Pacific. Within a quarter of a century the new nation had established herself as a Power by the sensational defeat, on land and sea, of China. The Peace of Shimonoseki extended her territory to Formosa and the Pescadores, and filled her treasury with the great war indemnity of £57,000,000. She then won, too, a footing on the Asiatic mainland, but was for the time being cheated of that by the interference of Europe, an interference which was not repeated when, later, having defeated Russia in war and having won an alliance with Great Britain, she finally annexed Corea.

From the Peace of Shimonoseki in 1895 the progress of Japan has been marvellous. In 1900 she appeared as one of the civilised Powers which invaded China with a view to impress upon that Empire the duty a semi-civilised Power owed to the world of maintaining internal order. In 1902 she entered into a defensive and offensive alliance with Great Britain, by which she was guaranteed a ring clear from interference on the part of a European combination in the struggle with Russia which she contemplated. The treaty was a triumph of diplomatic wisdom. Appearing to get little, Japan in real truth got all that her circumstances required. A treaty binding Great Britain to come to her aid in any war would have been hopeless to ask for, and not very useful when obtained, for the Japanese attack on Russia might then have been the signal for a general European war in which possibly a European combination would have crippled Great Britain and then turned its united attention to the destruction of Japan's nascent power. A treaty which kept the ring clear for a single-handed struggle with Russia was better than that risk. In return Japan gave nothing in effect except a pledge to make war on her own immediate enemy, Russia, for the assistance of Great Britain if necessity arose.

The conditions created by the Anglo-Japanese treaty of 1902 developed naturally to the Battle of Mukden, the culminating point of a campaign in which for the first time for many years the Yellow Race vanquished the White Race in war. That Battle of Mukden not only established Japan's position in the world. It made the warlike awakening of China inevitable, and restored to the daylight again the long-hidden yet always existing arrogance of Asia. Asia has ever nurtured an insolence beside which any White Race pride is insignificant. That fact is made patent during recurring epochs of history. The Persian Darius sent to the Greeks for earth and water, symbols to acknowledge that "Persia ruled the land and the oceans." The Huns later looked upon the White Men whom they conquered as something lower than animals. The Turks, another great Asiatic race to war against Europe, could compare the White Man only to that unclean beast, the dog. The first European ambassadors who went to China were forced to crawl with abject humility to the feet of the Chinese dignitaries. In his secret heart—of which the European mind knows so little—the Asiatic, whether he be Japanese, Chinese, or Indian, holds a deep disdain for the White. The contempt we feel for them is returned more than one hundredfold.

Mukden brought that disdain out of its slumber. The battle was therefore an event of history more important than any since the fall of Constantinople. For very many years the European hegemony had been unquestioned. True, as late as 1795, Napoleon is credited with having believed that the power of the Grand Turk might be revived and an Ottoman suzerainty of Europe secured. But it was only a dream; more than half a century before that the doom of the Turk, who had been the most serious foe to Christian Europe, was sealed. From 1711 to 1905, whatever questions of supremacy arose among the different European Powers, there was never any doubt as to the superiority of the European race over all coloured races. The White Man moved from one easy conquest to another. In Asia, India, China, Persia and Japan were in turn humbled. Africa was made the slave-farm of the White Race.

Now in the twentieth century at Mukden the White Race supremacy was again challenged. It was a long-dormant though not a new issue which was thus raised. From the times beyond which the memory of man does not stretch, Asia had repeatedly threatened Europe. The struggle of the Persian Empire to smother the Greek republics is the first of the invasions which has been accurately recorded by historians; but probably it had been preceded by many others. The waves of war that followed were many. The last was the Ottoman invasion in the fourteenth century, which brought the banners of Asia right up to the walls of Vienna, swept the Levant of Christian ships, and threatened even the Adriatic; and which has left the Turk still in the possession of Constantinople. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century the fear of the Turks gaining the mastery of Europe had practically disappeared, and after then the Europeans treated the coloured races as subject to them, and their territories as liable to partition whenever the method of division among rival White nations could be agreed upon.

Mukden made a new situation. The European Powers were prompt to recognise the fact. Doubt even came to Great Britain whether the part she had played as foster-mother to this Asiatic infant of wonderful growth had been a wise one. A peace was practically forced upon Japan, a peace which secured for her at the moment nothing in the way of indemnity, but little in the way of territorial rights, and not even the positive elimination of her enemy from the Asiatic coast. True, she has since won Corea on the basis of that peace and has made secure certain suzerain rights in Manchuria, but this harvest had to be garnered by resolute diplomacy and by maintaining a naval and military expenditure after the war which called for an extreme degree of self-abnegation from her people.

If the present position of affairs could be accepted as permanent, there would be no "problem of the Pacific." That ocean would be Japan's home-water. Holding her rugged islands with a veteran army and navy; so established on the mainland of Asia as to be able to make a flank movement on China; she is the one "Power in being" of the Pacific littoral. But as already stated, the verdict of the war with Russia cannot be taken as final. And soon the United States will come into the Pacific with overwhelming force on the completion of the Panama Canal—an event which is already foreshadowed in a modification of the Anglo-Japanese treaty to relieve Great Britain of the possible responsibility of going to war with America on behalf of Japan. The permanence of the Japanese position as the chief Power of the Pacific cannot therefore be presumed. The very suddenness with which her greatness has been won is in itself a prompting to the suspicion that it will not last. It has been a mushroom growth, and there are many indications that the forcing process by which a Power has been so quickly raised has exhausted the culture bed. In the character of her population Japan is in some respects exceedingly rich. The events of the past few years have shown them to possess great qualities of heroism, patience and discipline. But they have yet to prove that they possess powers of initiative, without which they must fail ultimately in competition with peoples who make one conquest over Nature a stepping-stone to another. And it is not wholly a matter of race prejudice that makes many observers view with suspicion the "staying power" of the character of a nation which thinks so differently from the average European in matters of sex, in commercial honesty, and in the obligations of good faith. Many of those who have travelled in the East, or have done business with Japan, profess a doubt that an enduring greatness can be built upon a national character which runs contrary in most matters to our accepted ideas of ethics. They profess to see in the present greatness of achievement marking Japanese national life a "flash in the pan"—the astonishing precocity and quickness of progress of that type of doomed infant which quickly flowers and quickly fades in the European slums and which is known as "The Mongol" to medical science because of a facial peculiarity which identifies it infallibly. "The Mongol" of European child-life comes to an astonishingly early maturity of brain: its smartness is marvellous. But it is destined always to an early end from an ineradicable internal weakness which is, in some strange way, the cause of its precocious cleverness.

Whether the Japanese cleverness and progressiveness will last or not, the nation has to be credited with them now as a live asset. But apart from the national character the nation possesses little of "natural capital." There is practically no store of precious metals; a poor supply of the useful minerals; small area of good land; and the local fisheries have been exploited with such energy for many generations that they cannot possibly be expanded in productivity now. The statesmen of New Japan have certainly won some overseas Empire as an addition to the resources available for a sound fabric of national greatness. But what has been won is quite insufficient to weigh in the scale against the "natural capital" of almost any of Japan's rivals in the Pacific.

For want of territory to colonise under her own flag, Japan has lost many subjects to alien flags. Japanese settlements of some strength exist on the Pacific coast of America, in the Hawaiian Islands, and in parts of China. There is little doubt that Japanese policy has hoped that in some cases at least her flag would follow her nationals. Talk, not all of it quite irresponsible, has credited Japan with definite designs on many Pacific settlements, especially the Hawaiian Group where her nationals to-day outnumber any other single element of the population. But there are now no islands or territories without a protecting flag. Even when, as was said to be the case with Mexico and another Latin-American country, a weak and friendly nation seems to offer the chance of annexation of territory following a peaceable penetration, there is the power of the United States to interpose a veto. Japan thus cannot add to her natural resources without a war; and she has not, it would seem, sufficient natural resources to back up a war with the enemies she would have to meet now in the Pacific.

If she were to put aside dreams of conquest and Empire, has Japan a sound future in the Pacific as a thriving minor manufacturing and trading power? I must say that it seems to me doubtful. The nation has drunk of the wine of life and could hardly settle down to a humdrum existence. No peaceable policy could allow of a great prosperity, for the reasons of natural poverty already stated. It would be a life of drudgery without the present dream of glory. To study the Japanese emigrant away from his own country is to understand that he has not the patience for such a life. In British Columbia, in California, in Hawaii, the same conclusion is come to by European fellow-residents, that the Japanese worker is arrogant, unruly, unreliable. In Japan itself there are signs that the industrial population will not tolerate for ever a life of very poor living and very hard working if there is not a definite and immediate benefit of national glory promised.

The position of Japan in the Pacific seems to me, then, that she cannot reasonably expect to win in a struggle for its mastery: and yet that she will inevitably be forced to enter into that struggle. A recent report in a Tokio paper stated: "At a secret session of the Budget Commission on February 3, Baron Saito, Minister of Marine, declared that the irreducible minimum of naval expansion was eight battleships of the super-Dreadnought class, and eight armoured cruisers of the same class, which must be completed by 1920, construction being begun in 1913. The cost is estimated at £35,000,000." And the paper (Asahi Shimbun) went on to hint at the United States as the Power which had to be confronted. That is only one of very many indications of Japanese national feeling. She has gone too far on the path to greatness to be able to retire safely into obscurity. She must "see it through." Feats of strength far nearer to the miraculous than those which marked her astonishing victory over Russia would be necessary to give Japan the slightest chance of success in the next struggle for the hegemony of the Pacific.