the indirect
influence of our regard for woman, not as an inferior and a plaything,
but as a comrade and helpmeet. How frequently the ideal of English
chivalry--

"To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
To worship her by years of noble deeds"--

has been the inspiration of the best that men of our race have
wrought, it needs only a glance at our literature to {272} suggest.
These things are indeed basic and fundamental and the question of
their conservation, the preservation of the ideals of the Occident as
compared with those of the Orient, is supremely important not only to
us as a nation but to all our human race. But when one comes to
consider only the sheer economic causes of the difference between
Oriental poverty and Occidental plenty, it seems to me impossible to
escape the conviction, already expressed and elaborated that it is
mainly a matter of tools and knowledge, education and machinery.

In the Orient every man is producing as little as possible; in the
Occident he is producing as much as possible. That is the case in a
nutshell.

With better knowledge and better tools, half the people now engaged in
food-production in Asia could produce all the food that the entire
rural population now produces, and the other half could be released
for manufacturing--thereby doubling the earning power and the spending
power of the whole population.

It is universal education and modern machinery, far more than virgin
resources, that have made America rich and powerful. Let her make
haste then to learn this final lesson that the Orient teaches--the
necessity of conserving in the fullest degree all the powers that have
given us industrial supremacy: the power of the trained brain and the
cunning hand reinforced by all the magic strength that we may get from
our Briarean "Slave of the Lamp," modern machinery. We must thoroughly
educate all our people. Was it not an Oriental prophet who wrote: "My
people are destroyed for lack of knowledge?" In China only 1 per cent,
of the people can now read and write, and the highest hope of the
government is that 5 per cent, may be literate by 1917. In India only
5 per cent, can read and write. In Japan for centuries past, the
education of the common man has also been neglected, but she is now
compelling every child to go into the schools, {273} and her industrial
system will doubtless be revolutionized at a result.

In no case must we forget that education, if it is to be e