hysiological theory of national character may
be seen almost at a glance by a look at Japan. Were an Oriental
necessarily and unchangeably Oriental, it would have been impossible
for Japan to have come into such close and sympathetic touch with the
West.

The conflict of the East with the West, however, is not an inherent
and unending conflict, because it is not racial, but civilizational.
It is a conflict of world-views and systems of thought and life. It is
a conflict of heathen and Christian civilizations. And the conflict
will come to an end as soon as, and in proportion as, China awakes
from her blindness and begins to build her national temple on the
bedrock of universal truth and righteousness. The conflict is
practically over in Japan because she has done this. In loyally
accepting science, popular education, and the rights of every
individual to equal protection by the government, Japan has accepted
the fundamental conceptions of civilization held in the West, and has
thus become an integral part of Christendom, a fact of world-wide
significance. It proves that the most important differences now
separating the great races of men are civilizational, not
physiological. It also proves that European, American, and Oriental
peoples may be possessed by the same great ideals of life and
principles of action, enabling them to co-operate as nations in great
movements to their mutual advantage.

While even we of the West may be long in learning the full
significance of what has been and still is taking place in Japan and
more conspicuously just now, because more tragically, in China, one
thing is clear: steam and electricity have abolished forever the old
isolation of the nations.

Separated branches of the human race that for thousands of years have
been undergoing divergent evolution, producing radically different
languages, customs, civilizations, systems of thought and world-views,
and have resulted even in marked physiological and psychological
differences, are now being brought into close contact and inevitable
conflict. But at bottom it is a conflict of ideas, not of races. The
age of isolation and divergent evolution is passing away, and that of
international association and convergent social evolution has begun.
Those races and nations that refuse to recognize the new social order,
and oppose the cosmic process and its forces, will surely be pushed to
the wall and cease to exist as independent nations, just