f to be in
other respects, he fails to grasp a radically new idea where the Chinese
succeeds.

Here we have the Chinese, four hundred millions of him, occupying a vast
land of immense natural resources--resources of a twentieth-century age,
of a machine age; resources of coal and iron, which are the backbone of
commercial civilization. He is an indefatigable worker. He is not dead
to new ideas, new methods, new systems. Under a capable management he
can be made to do anything. Truly would he of himself constitute the
much-heralded Yellow Peril were it not for his present management. This
management, his government, is set, crystallized. It is what binds him
down to building as his fathers built. The governing class, entrenched
by the precedent and power of centuries and by the stamp it has put upon
his mind, will never free him. It would be the suicide of the governing
class, and the governing class knows it.

Comes now the Japanese. On the streets of Antung, of Feng-Wang-Chang, or
of any other Manchurian city, the following is a familiar scene: One is
hurrying home through the dark of the unlighted streets when he comes
upon a paper lantern resting on the ground. On one side squats a Chinese
civilian on his hams, on the other side squats a Japanese soldier. One
dips his forefinger in the dust and writes strange, monstrous characters.
The other nods understanding, sweeps the dust slate level with his hand,
and with his forefinger inscribes similar characters. They are talking.
They cannot speak to each other, but they can write. Long ago one
borrowed the other's written language, and long before that, untold
generations ago, they diverged from a common root, the ancient Mongol
stock.

There have been changes, differentiations brought about by diverse
conditions and infusions of other blood; but down at the bottom of their
being, twisted into the fibres of them, is a heritage in common--a
sameness in kind which time has not obliterated. The infusion of other
blood, Malay, perhaps, has made the Japanese a race of mastery and power,
a fighting race through all its history, a race which has always despised
commerce and exalted fighting.

To-day, equipped with the finest machines and systems of destruction the
Caucasian mind has devised, handling machines and systems with remarkable
and deadly accuracy, this rejuvenescent Japanese race has embarked on a
course of conquest the goal of which no man knows. Th