w of these things it is not surprising to learn that in the last
fifty years Japan has increased in population, through the birth rate
alone, "as fast as the United States has gained from the birth rate
plus her enormous immigration." The racial fertility of the Chinese is
also well known; a Chinaman without sons to worship his spirit when he
dies is not only temporarily discredited but eternally doomed. As for
India, that every Hindu girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a
widow is a common saying, and readers of "Kim" and "The Naulahka" will
recall the ancient and persistent belief that the wife who is not also
a mother of sons is a woman of ill-omen.

Mr. Putman Weale abundantly justifies the title of his new book, "The
Conflict of Color"--the seeming foreordination of some readjustment of
racial relations if present tendencies continue--when he asserts that
while the white races double {271} in eighty years, the yellow or
brown double in sixty, and the black in forty.

This last consideration, that of a possible readjustment of racial
relations, leads us very naturally to inquire, What are the qualities
that have given the white race the leadership thus far? And what may
we do for the conservation of these qualities?

There are, of course, certain basic and fundamental reasons for white
leadership that I need not elaborate. For one thing, there is the
tonic air of democratic ideals in which long generations of white men
have lived and developed as contrasted with the stifling absolutism of
the East. There is also our emphasis upon the worth of the Individual,
our conception of the sacredness of personality, as compared with the
Oriental lack of concern for the individual in its supreme regard for
the family and the State. And even more important perhaps is the fact
that the white man has had a religion that has taught--even if
somewhat confusedly at times--that "man is man and master of his
fate," that he is not a plaything of destiny, but a responsible son of
God with enormous possibilities for good or evil, whereas the Oriental
has been the victim of benumbing fatalism that has made him
indifferent in industry and achievement, though it has given him a
greater recklessness in war. It would also be difficult to exaggerate
the influence which our radically different estimate of woman has had
upon Western civilization. And here we have to consider not only
woman's own direct contributions to progress, but also