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Nor should Chinese patriots be sold without some protest. Breathes there an American boy whose heart does not stir before the statues of Nathan Hale and the Minute-Man? Young hearts and old hearts beat with the same emotion, against an alien tyrant on the other side of this round world. China is a land of patriots-patriots whom ruthless massacre and and excruciating agonies devised by Oriental ingenuity have not put down.

Westward the star of empire takes its way-the star of Japanese empire, the star to which Mr. Wilson has hitched his obedient wagon, and before it sinks a true democracy.

China has always had her kings and emperors. It has, however, been the practice of her governments, ancient and modern, even under monarchs theoretically absolute, to act in substantial obedience to law, precedent, custom, and public opinion. In China there are no feudal lords, no caste, and, with small exceptions that do not affect the structure of society, there is no hereditary nobility. The poorest boy in China can rise to wealth and power. Until the withering hand of Europe fell on China, the machinery for finding talent among the poor and putting it on the path of ambition was singularly ingenious and effective.

The highest positions in the state have always been open to the humblest peasant. Intellectual training is at the disposal of the poorest.

China has always been at the highest rung of the democratic ladder.

Local self-government, democratic equality of opportunity, and decentralization have always been the rule in China.

The secret of China's prolonged existence as a nation has been her democracy and freedom.

An imperial decree of 1122 B. C. ordered that in admitting students to examination for degrees no distinction should be made between high and low, rich and poor. The emperor's own son was sent to a common school.

I do not find in the England of the twelfth century B.C. any such democratic ideals, or even in her subsequent history. There are only two great

democracies, China and the United States. If each of these great democracies were independent and unhampered by the encroachments and alliances of selfish aliens, and if they were sympathetic with each other, and working together, without leagues and covenants, by the development of their own wealth and their own citizens and their own art, they would be impregnable.

Korea has shown that where the Japanese conquers a foreign country he abstracts with skill new riches from the land, but that under the cold tyranny of Japanese colonial officials men decay. Under them these Chinese democrats will become actually slaves and will decline in civilization. We bind the most democratic of democracies to a highly organized aristocracy, an oligarchy operating under the forms of autocracy.

The Japanese conquest is carefully arranged to fit in with the partitioning process begun by England and France before 1840, on the theory that China is "backward" and that it is for us to take her apart and enlighten her insides and abstract her valuables. It would have been better, if, instead, Chinese had been sent to put Europe together-Europe, in politics, is herself a "backward" continent. We have learned to think of the Indian peninsula, with its entanglements of races, languages, and religions, collectively, as India. It will tend to clearness of thought if we study in the same way the small disorderly peninsula of Europe. The inhabitants of Tahiti used to think about themselves as the "world." Europe has had a similar barbarous illusion. Most of our own statesmen, when small boys, were taught from Swinton's "History of Civilization and the World's Progress." That book is a literary curiosity. It contains no reference to Japan or China.

The time is not so far distant when European wars will be known only to special students, as are now the wars of the fighting Cheyennes. To them Europe's brilliant achievements in art and science will gleam as flashes in the darkness. Politically she will interest them chiefly as the mother hive of the American swarms and by reason of her raids on Asia.

In political evolution Europe is far behind the United States, China, and Japan. Europe, until recent times, has been torn by wars of religion. Such wars are unknown to us, and to Chinese and Japanese they seem absurd. Chinese and Japanese persecutions have been purely political in motive.

Europeans, in their old habitat, have shown no capacity to make any great combination in which the parts shall be friendly and equal. They do not know how to make a partnership, but they do know how to get a strangle-hold. They make short friendships and long hatreds and kaleidoscopic alliances, always for some temporary advantage. The small cities and states of ancient Greece, the Italian cities, the German principalities, the Balkan States, have exhibited, among the most brilliant and vigorous of Europeans, a weary succession of race wars and group wars. It is significant that to this day the history of the Peloponnesian War is the prime text-book of the budding English statesman. Even Norway and Sweden, even Belgium and Holland, could not hold together.

It is an index of Europe's incapacity to cure race conflicts that, after mismanaging Ireland for four hundred years, the British colonized northern Ireland with Scotch, as representatives of Ireland's conquerors, thus ingeniously infecting wretched Ireland with a new problem of conflicting religions and a new problem of conflicting races.

Has England learned anything from that object lesson or from the race conflicts that make Europe a museum of political disease? Wilson learned the lesson and preached it. What lure of ambition has led him not to practise it?

When we shout and fight for the "principle" of "nationality," I suppose we mean that men of one race should be free to make themselves into one nation. We ourselves, despite our blacks, are, as regards unity, a bright contrast to Europe; but China proper, the eighteen provinces, is the supreme example of the principle.

China, though herself a continent in area, has reached our ideal of coterminous race and nationality. China

has no undigested Irish, Germans, blacks, or Jews. Like fossils that tell the geologic story, she has only a few picturesque traces of aborigines, Hakkas, Lolos, and wild mountaineers in Yunnan. In India the Black Jews of Malabar are still Jews. The Jews of China are Chinese. Through war after war, through centuries of wise administration, by the Chinese genius for combination, and by the art of the schoolmaster, she has made into one people all her tribes and nations. "The Han dynasty, B.C. 206, maintained nationalism against feudalism by the justice of its rule." Fur-clad trappers of the Yenesei head waters, rude mountaineers of the Chinese Himalayas, hardy sailors that brave the typhoons of the Southern seas, nomad herdsmen of the Northern plains, rice-planters and monkey-hunters of the tropic South, lumbermen of Yunnan, students of Ningpo, silk-weavers of Soochowall are Chinese, believers in the philosophy of Confucius, reverent of age and learning, and schooled in that filial piety which is the foundation of China's social system. Yet they are still various in character and habits. A Chinese proverb says that customs change every ten miles.

Japan also achieved unity three hundred years ago; but China's unity has no parallel on a great scale except the glorious unity of these United States.

Despite recurrent famines and wars, China, alternately conquered and conquering, has maintained in each of many centuries an empire that might well be regarded as the greatest of its time. Even so late as the eighteenth century, when the statesman Kien Lung was emperor, and the muttonhead George III was our king, China was richer and more formidable than any other state. Siam, Ryu Kyu, and Korea were friendly and sent her tribute. Tropic Burma, rugged Nepal, and the chilly deserts of Turkestan heard the imperial thunder of her war-drums. Her three hundred millions of industrious and orderly people were free from opium and free from drunkenness, a paradisaic state to Europeans inconceivable. The splendor of this empire has faded, but the intrinsic unity of the

people, despite all temporary discords,

is still unbroken.

Some contend that by the Shan-tung award China loses nothing; that one of her provinces merely changes masters. The intrusion of the Germans, French, and English never drove the Chinese to despair. The Chinese knew them to be an ephemeral evil. Europe's brief day, indeed, may be already drawing to an end in a blood-red sunset. The Japanese, however, once planted in Shan-tung, are there forever. As Ulster is to Ireland, so will Shan-tung be to China; but where Ulster has tens of thousands, Shan-tung has millions.

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Partitioned between France and England, each half of China might grow rich with railroads and factories, and then, with explosive force, the two nations would join, and the aliens would disappear. The importing, however, into China of Japanese, prolific, multitudinous, near at hand, means turies of a new continental race war, another age-long struggle, the repetition on a giant scale of Norman against Saxon, French against Germans, Spanish against Dutch, Christian against Moor. It means the destruction of the unity of the Chinese and the downfall of the race, which is to-day perilously weakened by our having battered, poisoned, and undermined it for eighty years with every weapon of war and peace, with smugglers, diplomatists, and artillery, with opium and morphine.

The young men of America carried our flag to a splendid victory. The old men of Paris bemired it in diplomacy. Four men in Paris, in the intervals between their more serious labors, pronounced the doom of the Chinese millions and of Chinese millions yet unborn. They plant with care the seeds, the dragon's teeth, of new war, eternal war. We went to war to set men free. These men enslave three hundred millions.

The old men of Paris, weary with a lifelong struggle for place, hardened by human suffering, by frequent disillusionment, their consciences seared by the habitual practice of diplomacy, have taught us new views.

One fifth of mankind, with blood and patience, has already lifted itself in its

slow progress upward above the degrading afflictions of race conflict. Compared with the statesman who now plants in that nation a new race conflict, the distributor of typhus germs is a philanthropist.

The dissolution of the democracy of the East has been planned for many years, and was plotted with precision before the outbreak of the Great War. The crime of Paris is the latest in a long series of offenses. China is weak, unarmed, and backward in the use of modern machinery. This is the fruit of a process begun by England eighty years ago, in which we have all shared; in which the Romanoffs took the place of head devil, and in which Japan has now become the directing force.

The progressive partition of China went slowly because of the wealth at stake. It was sufficiently obvious that whatever outsider could annex China could rule the world. Russia hoped to get all of China for herself, but England, France, and Germany could not agree to that, nor with one another. The survivors are at last ready to agree.

Europe got the drop, to use the language of highwaymen, on China, through the happy chance of stumbling on steam. That led to modern arms and to the means, still diverted by statesmen to other uses, to better the lot of all men. With our modern weapons we forced opium on China and poisoned her people. The Japanese continue the practice with morphine. No modern improvement is neglected.

We throttled Chinese patriots somewhat as if we had interfered in behalf of the Duke of Alva against the Dutch; we caused civil wars to be prolonged, and cut down the strength of China with famine, sword, and disease. We crippled her finances, and imposed our own tariffs. Corruption follows impoverishment. It is not centuries since that an English king was in the pay of France. The Romanoffs, experts in corruption, bought influence all the way up to the throne. They fomented the Boxer War. To-day we take from every coolie in China some of his salt and rice to pay for this Romanoff crime. The Japanese have inherited the place of the

Romanoffs as purchasers of power and creators of disorder.

The Japanese know how to make medicine of their great revenges. We cannot grudge them their secret rapture when they lay the whip across the Chinese back and know that each lash has a sting in it for arrogant America. For our abject submissiveness to Japan we have ourselves to blame. Our moneyed men, with that unerring instinct for making political blunders that has always marked the breed, sent Perry to tear open the door of peaceful, cloistered Japan, and now she must arm herself; and some of us will be stepped on before she is done with it.

Japan's history shows that she has heretofore been led toward conquest, and has heretofore deliberately turned away from it. By the light of that history we may learn how Japan may be persuaded again toward peace. The Japanese, now the terror of the East, have been lovers of peace. In former times Japan sought conquest only to ward off conquerors. It is true that the soldier who brought unity to Japan laid plans for world-wide war. He said in 1577: "China, Korea, and Japan will be one. I shall do it all as easily as a man rolls up a piece of matting and carries it under his arm." In 1587 he said, "Invading the country of the great Ming, I will fill with the hoar-frost from my sword the whole sky over the four hundred provinces." To the viceroy of the Philippines he sent a message commanding him to leave the islands.

But after him came Ieyasu, the great shogun, whose sacred ashes have lain for three hundred years under the solemn cryptomerias of Nikko. Like Washington, he had clearness of vision, freedom from prejudice, freedom from old ideas. He had notable powers of observation, reflection, and action. A man of less originality would have pursued the enticing path of conquest marked out by Hideyoshi. Japan would have made good the boasts of Hideyoshi and conquered China, then passing through one of her paroxysms of disorder and helplessness. Seeking all information, the shogun sent a secret envoy to Europe. The Europe of 1600 was a dove-cote to the Europe of 1919. Yet

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the envoy's report filled him with horror. Thereupon, Japan, under his guidance, made her marvelous decision to turn away from all foreign adventure either of commerce or war, to hold no intercourse with Europe, to pursue the arts of peace, and to devote her energy to the welfare of her own people.

We have had our Washington and Jefferson, who have warned us against the politics of Europe as the source of all evil. After a hundred years we have forgotten them; after three hundred years the Japanese have forgotten their great shogun.

We have been taught to detest ambitious conquerors, who add land to land, make slaves of free men, and rob nations of their riches. We cannot withhold, then, our admiration of the great Japanese pacifist, the statesman, who resolved on a perpetual policy of non-interference. He gave his people solemn injunctions against ambition, and "employed scholars in constructing a solid framework of peace."

Two hundred and sixteen years of peace is a boon that neither God nor statesmen ever granted to any great modern nation but Japan. If the lesser Tokugawas, rulers at Yedo after Ieyasu, had followed his example, they could have enjoyed the peace he created, and at the same time, in their seclusion, could have moved forward step by step in the use of engines and steam and steel as fast as England, and been safe.

Before our Great War, Western nations had begun to prosper through the use of the scientific spirit, love of truth, and knowledge for its own sake. But to-day among us the scientific spirit is dead. Free research and the uncensored distribution of knowledge are no more. The lesser Tokugawas were like the small, modern Metternichs that now try to blind our souls. The Tokugawas made no error in continuing to exclude Europeans, but they made the fatal error of excluding knowledge. They saved about two hundred dollars a year by not even hiring people to read the books that came once a year to Desima. Perry's invasion and Japan's humiliating subjection to the powers were the retribution for this neglect, falling on

them with the suddenness and horror of a thunderbolt from the blue sky.

By another of those swift, decisive, and complete changes of policy of which Japan alone seems capable, she changed the very foundations of her society, held fast to what she treasured of the old, and acquired quickly all the virtues and some of the vices of Europe. She has not only made herself one of the great powers, but she seems to have determined to become a great conqueror, fattening on vassal nations. If she pursues this course, we may be sure that, with her fine Japanese hand, she will from time to time form all the combinations necessary, and with her military skill will win, and win cheaply, all the necessary battles. She has proceeded one by one against her enemies, and one by one, the nearest first, they have fallen in ruins, all the way from Fusan to Strasburg. If she does not again become pacifist, the process of toppling over empires that trampled on her when she was weak may not stop at Strasburg.

She plays in steady good luck, because She plays in steady good luck, because now she uses every weapon, and despises no knowledge, high or low. She studies the character of our elder statesmen, from Washington to Wilson, and of our younger patriots, from Nathan Hale to Hard-Boiled Smith. She knows how to set Kodama against Kuropatkin, Togo against Rojestvensky, Ishii against Lansing, and Saionji against Wilson.

The solution does not lie in compressing a great race within narrow islands. Nor does the solution lie in helping them to enslave another great race, and to lift themselves, at the expense of a groaning world, into the possession of an empire like Great Britain or Russia.

The Romanoff Empire was a disease; the British Empire is an accident. Such empires carry in their hearts the seeds of ruin. Such empires are of evil example. The welfare of the world lies in Japan's turning away from following after them.

The remedy lies in persuading Japan to direct her energies towards eastern Siberia. Eastern Siberia is at this moment such a desert, in many respects,

as was our famous "Great American Desert." China is like a rich thickly inhabited plain. Japan is like an overflowing mountain lake, ready to burst in an irresistible, destructive torrent over the rich inhabited plain. If the flood can be diverted and directed to the desert, peace and prosperity will follow. I pray that those who are of my way of thinking as to Russian policy will not oppose this remedy.

Fear and hatred of the Romanoffs has been with many of us all our days. We look with horror on Koltchak and Sazonoff. We deplore the temptations that led our Government to send men or munitions into Russia and Siberia. We regret, however, that some who are of our way of thinking in this regard have expressed the fear that the acquisition of land in eastern Siberia by Japan is a dismemberment of Russia and an interference in her affairs.

Eastern Siberia is no more a part of Russia than the Philippines are a part of our States. Russia's title to eastern Siberia, including Transbaikalia, Kamchatka, and those provinces which make the basins of the Amur and Sungari, is purely technical. Some of this land the czar got by bribery and coercion; other regions by the sending of an explorer with a flag to claim them. With all its wealth of minerals, forests, farm-land, and fisheries, the czar has never effectively used this territory. There has been but little effective settlement except in such towns as Vladivostok and the railway towns. After all these years, the population is only four times as dense as that of the Sahara. A traveler in the air will see only four times as many people in eastern Siberia as he sees when he crosses the Sahara. Most of the inhabitants are Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Mongols, and Buriats. Most of the immigrants are of the adventurous sort that could get along just as well with Japanese settlers as they ever did with the czar. The czar used to keep down Mongolian immigration by a sort of periodical pogrom. Such acts forfeit title.

Our true course, our only honest course, is to propose that France, England, America, and Japan withdraw all coercion from China, and that she be

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