compensated for by an extraordinary picturesqueness of life and a
wonderful luxuriance of nature. The Oriental trip also makes less demand
on one's reading than even a hasty journey through Europe. There are few
pictures, few statues. Only India and Egypt appeal to the sense of the
historical, Japan stands alone, alien to all our ways of life and
thought, but so intensely artistic, so saturated with the intellectual
spirit that it seems to belong to another world than this material,
commercial existence that stamps all European and American life. The new
China furnishes an attractive field of study, but unfortunately when I
visited the country it was in the throes of revolution and travel was
dangerous anywhere outside the great treaty ports.

One of the best results of foreign travel is that it makes one revise
his estimate of alien races. When I started out it was with a strong
prejudice against the Japanese, probably due to my observation of some
rather unlovely specimens whom I had encountered in San Francisco. A
short stay in Japan served to give me a new point of view in regard to
both the people and the country of the Mikado. It was impossible to
escape from the fact that here is a race which places loyalty to country
and personal honor higher than life, and this sentiment was not confined
to the educated and wealthy classes but was general throughout the
nation. Here also is a people so devoted to the culture of beauty that
they travel hundreds of miles to see the annual chrysanthemum and other
flower festivals. And here is a people so devoted to art for art's sake
that even the poor and uneducated have little gardens in their back
yards and houses which reveal a refined taste in architecture and
decoration. The poorest artisans are genuine artists and their work
shows a beauty and a finish only to be found in the work of the highest
designers in our country.

In one chapter of the section on Japan, I have dwelt on the ingenious
theory that it is their devotion to the garden that has kept the
Japanese from being spoiled by the great strides they have made in the
last twenty years in commerce and conquest. To take foremost place
among the powers of the world without any preliminary struggle is an
achievement which well might turn the heads of any people; yet this
exploit has simply confirmed the Japanese in the opinion that their
national training has resulted in this success that other nations have
won only b