ill Japan be an international danger-spot
because there will lack those democratic restraints which this war has
shown are absolutely essential to secure a peaceful understanding among
the nations. It is for this reason that Japan will fail to attain the
position the art-genius and industry of her people entitle her to and
must limp behind the progress of the world unless a very radical
revision of the constitution is achieved. The disabilities which arise
from an archaic survival are so great that they will affect China as
adversely as Japan, and therefore should be universally understood.

Japanese history, if stripped of its superficial aspects, has a certain
remarkable quality; it seems steeped in heroic blood. The doctrine of
force, which expresses itself in its crudest forms in Europe, has always
been in Japan a system of heroic-action so fascinating to humanity at
large that until recent times its international significance has not
been realized. The feudal organization of Japanese society which arose
as a result of the armed conquest of the islands fifteen hundred years
ago, precluded centralizating measures being taken because the Throne,
relying on the virtues of Divine Ancestors rather than on any
well-articulated political theory, was weak in all except certain
quasisacerdotal qualities, and forced to rely on great chieftains for
the execution of its mandates as well as for its defence. The military
title of "barbarian-conquering general," which was first conferred on a
great clan leader eight centuries ago, was a natural enough development
when we remember that the autochthonous races were even then not yet
pushed out of the main island, and were still battling with the
advancing tide of Japanese civilization which was itself composed of
several rival streams coming from the Asiatic mainland and from the
Malayan archipelagoes. This armed settlement saturates Japanese history
and is responsible for the unending local wars and the glorification of
the warrior. The conception of triumphant generalship which Hideyoshi
attempted unsuccessfully to carry into Korea in the Sixteenth Century,
led directly at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century to the formal
establishment of the Shogunate, that military dictatorship being the
result of the backwash of the Korean adventure, and the greatest proof
of the disturbance which it had brought in Japanese society. The
persistence of this hereditary military dictatorship f