ever in Cuba and the South, and just as we shall
eventually come to recognize the prevalence of typhoid in any town as
a disgrace--an evidence of primitive and uncivilized {57} sanitary
conditions. A friend of mine who came to Osaka in 1879 tells me that
there were 10,000 cholera victims in that one city that year--the
yellow flag on almost every street, and all through the night the
sound of men hurrying past with new victims for the hospitals or with
new corpses for the burning. In the thirteen years 1878-91 more than
313,000 Japanese died of the scourge.

I regret to say good-by to Japan. It is a tremendously interesting
country. For just as America represents the ultimate type of
Occidental civilization, so does Japan represent the ultimate type of
Oriental civilization.

More than this, it is here that the full tides of Oriental and
Occidental life are now meeting for the first time in human history.
For centuries uncounted the yellow man advanced across the plains and
peaks of Asia, finding at last in these outlying islands his
farthermost outpost, and so tarried here in the Farthest East, "the
Land of the Rising Sun." He hardly thought of the existence of a West,
but if his Buddha-like composure had been ruffled by such a thought,
he might have droned monotonously:

"Oh, East is East, and West is West,
and never the twain shall meet."

But while the yellow man had thus moved steadily eastward, the white
man, starting from the land of the Euphrates, had pitched his camp,
with each succeeding generation, nearer and nearer the setting sun.
Greece--Rome--Spain--France--England--then four hundred years ago,
more restless than the Mongolian, the white man dared the seas that
hemmed him in and found a new continent to people. Westward still the
course of empire then continued until in our time the white man
planted his civilization on the Pacific Coast.

There was no more West.

Then it was, as if in obedience to a cosmic, racial instinct deeper
than reason, the white man sent his messengers across the new-found
ocean and awakened the Sleepy World {58} of the Yellow Man by the
booming of Perry's guns off Yokahoma.

The Kingdom of Heaven, we are told, cometh not with observation, and
the deeper meaning of the greatest events in human history may often
escape the attention of contemporaries. My father and yours, perhaps,
heard little and thought less of Perry's exploit, and yet it marked
not merely a new hi