tate.

Japan's ideal cannot be offhandedly condemned as immoral, pernicious, or
illegitimate. Its partizans pertinently invoke every principle which
their Allies applied to their own aims and strivings. And men of deeper
insight than those who preside over the fortunes of the Entente to-day
recognize that Europeans of high principles and discerning minds, who
perceive the central issues, would, were they in the position of the
Japanese statesmen, likewise bend their energies to the achievement of
the same aims.

The Japanese argue their case somewhat as follows:

"We are determined to help China to put herself in line with ourselves,
and to keep her from falling into anarchy. And no one can honestly deny
our qualifications. We and they have very much in common, and we
understand them as no Anglo-Saxon or other foreign people can. On the
one hand our own past experience resembles that of the Middle Kingdom,
and on the other our method of adapting ourselves to the new
international conditions challenged and received the ungrudging
admiration of a world disposed to be critical. The Peking treaties of
May, 1915, between China and Japan, and the pristine drafts of them
which were modified before signature, enable the outsider to form a
fairly accurate opinion of Japan's economic and political program, which
amounts to the application of a Far Eastern Monroe Doctrine.

"What we seek to obtain in the Far East is what the Western Powers have
secured throughout the remainder of the globe: the right to contribute
to the moral and intellectual progress of our backward neighbors, and to
profit by our exertions. China needs the help which we are admittedly
able to bestow. To our mission no cogent objection has ever been
offered. No Cabinet in Tokio has ever looked upon the Middle Realm as a
possible colony for the Japanese. The notion is preposterous, seeing
that China is already over-populated. What Japan sorely needs are
sources whence to draw coal and iron for industrial enterprise. She also
needs cotton and leather."

In truth, the ever-ready command of these raw materials at their
sources, which must be neither remote nor subject to potential enemies,
is indispensable to the success of Japan's development. But for the
moment the English-speaking nations have a veto upon them, in virtue of
possession, and the embargo put by the United States government upon the
export of steel during the war caused a profound emotion in Nip