"I'll sum it up for you like this," he replied. "The Chinese treat you as a superior; the Japanese treat you as an equal."

Until Commodore Perry opened Japan to western civilization and commerce, we held all Mongolians in contempt, being pleased to consider them as inferior peoples. But in the case of the Japanese this contempt changed in a few years to a patronizing condescension, such as a grown person might have for a precocious and amusing child. We congratulated ourselves on having discovered in the Japanese a sort of infant prodigy; we took in them a proprietary interest. We watched their rapid rise in the world with almost paternal gratification. And the Japanese flattered our self-esteem by their open admiration and imitation of our methods.

I think that our national antipathy for the Japanese had its beginnings in their victory over the Russians. Up to that time we had looked on the Japanese as a brilliant and ambitious little people whom we had brought to the notice of the world and for whose amazing progress we were largely responsible. But when Japan administered a trouncing to the Russians, who are, after all, fellow-Caucasians, American sentiment performed a volte-face almost overnight. We were as pro-Russian at Portsmouth as we had been pro-Japanese at Port Arthur. This sudden change in our attitude toward them has always mystified the

Japanese. Yet there is really nothing mystifying about it. We were merely answering the call of the blood. As long as we believed Japan to be the under dog, we were for her; but when she became the upper dog, the old racial prejudice flamed up anew. A yellow people had humbled and humiliated a Caucasian people, and we, as Caucasians, resented it. It was a blow to our pride of race. (A somewhat similar manifestation of racial prejudice was observable throughout the United States when the negro pugilist, Jack Johnson, defeated Jim Jeffries.) That a yellow race could defeat a white race had never occurred to us, and we were correspondingly startled and alarmed. We abruptly ceased to think of the Japanese as a third-rate nation of polite, well-meaning, and harmless little men, drinkers of tea and wearers of kimonos. They became the Yellow Peril.

Though the Japanese are of Asia, they cannot be treated as we are accustomed to treat other Asiatics. To attempt to belittle or patronize a nation that can put into the field three million fighting men and send to sea a battle fleet not greatly inferior to our own, would be as ridiculous as it would be short-sighted. Japan is a striking example to other Oriental races of the power of the Big Stick. She has never been subjugated by the foreigner. In spite of, rather than by the aid of, the white man, she has become one of the Great Powers, and at Versailles helped to shape the destinies of millions of Europeans. Yet when she

claims racial equality we deny and resent it. Our refusal to treat the Japanese as equals, while at the same time showing a wholesome respect for the armed might that is behind them, reminds me of an American reserve lieutenant, a Southerner, on duty at a cantonment where there was a division of colored troops, who refused to salute a negro captain. He was called before the commanding officer, who gave him his choice between saluting the negro or being tried by court-martial.

"I suppose I'll have to salute the uniform," he muttered rebelliously, "but damned if I'll salute the nigger inside it."

III

I have already said that racial prejudice is at the bottom, the very bottom, of the friction between the two countries. Immediately overlying it is our fear of Japanese economic competition. For, if you will look into it, you will find that there has hardly ever been a conflict between nations into which some economic question has not entered as the final and essential factor. Never was this truer than in the American-Japanese situation. In considering the question of Japanese economic competition, it would seem that Americans fail to realize the extent to which Japanese business is aided, controlled, and directed by the Japanese Government.

The Japanese business man does not have to fight

unaided for foreign trade, as does the American. He has his government solidly behind him. Government-subsidized steamship lines and governmentowned railways give him every possible advantage. The government's ambassadors, ministers, consuls, and commercial agents lend him encouragement and assistance. Allied industries support him. Virtually all of the industries of the empire belong to trade guilds, which, like their European prototypes of the Middle Ages, are licensed by the government and are granted special privileges and immunities. In short, the Japanese business man is really a part of a gigantic trust, which differs from our American trusts only in that it is a government instead of a corporation.

The Japanese long since realized that their material resources were greatly inferior to those of other first-class powers, and that the realization of their national ambitions required great wealth as much as a great military establishment. They could not obtain this wealth by agriculture, for not only is Japan a comparatively small country territorially, but not more than fifteen per cent. of its area is capable of profitable cultivation. Moreover, there are already three hundred and fifty inhabitants to the square mile, and the birth-rate, like the cost of living, is steadily rising.

In Japan, as in the United States, to quote the words of a popular song: "The rich get richer and

the poor get children." Now the Japanese were fully conscious of the handicap under which they were struggling in their race for wealth and power. So they set about overcoming it by embarking upon a carefully planned campaign of industrial development and commercial expansion which, in its intensity and thoroughness, has no parallel save that which was waged by Germany prior to August, 1914. Perceiving that they could never hope to overtake their Western rivals by wading cautiously into the sea of commercial competition, they resolved to risk everything by plunging boldly into deep water. They risked everything and they won. By utilizing to the utmost what they already possessed, by taxing themselves until they staggered under the burden, by borrowing from the Occidental nations until their credit was stretched to the breaking-point, by speeding up the industrial machine until it was running twenty-four hours a day and three hundred and sixtyfive days a year, by hard work, rigid economy, and self-denial, they succeeded in raising the huge sums which they required for mills, factories, and powerplants, for railway and steamship lines, for docking and terminal facilities, for postal and telegraph systems. To-day, as a result of their courage and amazing energy, the Japanese are running neck-and-neck with the United States and England in the race for the commerce of the world. They are making matches at a price that has virtually closed the Asiatic markets