was conducted with more asperity than tact, if peace were the purpose, it was a good sore place for the Japanese statesmen to rub, and they resent in the newspapers the facile and cheap pacification resulting from the influence of the United States.  In addition the Japanese inhabitants, though they have a larger meal than they can speedily digest in Formosa, are not touched with unqualified pleasurable feeling because we have the Philippines in our grasp.  If Japan is to be the great power of the Pacific, it is inconvenient to her for us to hold the Hawaiian, the Aleutian and the Philippine groups of islands.  The Philippines have more natural resources than all the islands of Japan, and our Aleutian Islands that are waiting for development would probably be found, if thoroughly investigated, one of our great and good bargains.  The average American finds himself bothered to have to treat the Japanese seriously, but we must, for they take themselves so, and are rushing the work on new ships of war so that they will come out equal with ourselves in sea power.  They have ready for war one humdred thousand men.  If we did not hold any part of the Pacific Coast, this might be a matter of indifference, but we have three Pacific States, and there is no purpose to cede them to the Japanese.  It would not be statesmanship to give up the archipelagoes we possess, even if we consider them as lands to hold for the hereafter.  It is not deniable that the Japanese have good reason to stand off for strict examination the ships of other nations that call at their ports.  The British and Chinese have had an experience of the bubonic plague at Hongkong, and the Japanese are using all the power of arms and the artifice of science they possess to keep aloof from the disastrous disease, which is most contagious.  The China had called at Hongkong, and hence the sharp attentions at a coaling station where there are about seventy-five thousand inhabitants of the Japanese quarters, which are an exhibit of Old Japan, and most interesting.  Nagasaki has, indeed, the true Japanese flavor.  If there had been a sick man on our ship we should have been quarantined.  Further on we were halted in the night off the city of Kobe, to the sound of the firing of a cannon, for we had dropped there a passenger, Mr. Tilden, the Hongkong agent of the Pacific Mail line, and if our ship had been infected with plague he might have passed it on to Japan!  I had gone to bed, and was called up to confront the representative of the Imperial Government of the Japanese, and make clear to his eyes that I had not returned on account of the plague.  Authorities of Japan treat people who are quarantined in a way that removes the stress of disagreeableness.  All are taken ashore and to a hospital.  There is furnished a robe of the country, clean and tidy in all respects.  The common clothing is removed and fumigated.  It is necessary for each quarantined person to submit to this and also to a bath, which is a real luxury,