Old Japan
is still able to confer honors worth dying for.

* * * * *

Boys and girls in all the children's schools are now singing the Song
of Hiros['e] Ch[=u]sa, which is a marching song. The words and the
music are published in a little booklet, with a portrait of the late
commander upon the cover. Everywhere, and at all hours of the day, one
hears this song being sung:--

_He whose every word and deed gave to men an example of what
the war-folk of the_ _Empire of Nippon should be,--Commander
Hiros['e]: is he really dead?_

_Though the body die, the spirit dies not. He who wished
to be reborn seven times into this world, for the sake of
serving his country, for the sake of requiting the Imperial
favor,--Commander Hiros['e]: has he really died?_

_"Since I am a son of the Country of the Gods, the fire of the
evil-hearted Russians cannot touch me!"--The sturdy Takeo who
spoke thus: can he really be dead?..._

_Nay! that glorious war-death meant undying fame;--beyond a
thousand years the valiant heart shall live;--as to a god of
war shall reverence be paid to him...._

* * * * *

Observing the playful confidence of this wonderful people in their
struggle for existence against the mightiest power of the West,--their
perfect trust in the wisdom of their leaders and the valor of their
armies,--the good humor of their irony when mocking the enemy's
blunders,--their strange capacity to find, in the world-stirring
events of the hour, the same amusement that they would find in
watching a melodrama,--one is tempted to ask: "What would be the
moral consequence of a national defeat?"... It would depend, I think,
upon circumstances. Were Kuropatkin able to fulfill his rash threat
of invading Japan, the nation would probably rise as one man. But
otherwise the knowledge of any great disaster would be bravely borne.
From time unknown Japan has been a land of cataclysms,--earth-quakes
that ruin cities in the space of a moment; tidal waves, two hundred
miles long, sweeping whole coast populations out of existence; floods
submerging hundreds of leagues of well-tilled fields; eruptions
burying provinces. Calamities like this have disciplined the race in
resignation and in patience; and it has been well trained also to bear
with courage all the misfortunes of war. Even by the foreign peoples
that have been most close