and the rights of every individual to equal protection by the government, Japan has accepted the fundamental conceptions of civilization held in the West, and has thus become an integral part of Christendom, a fact of world-wide significance.  It proves that the most important differences now separating the great races of men are civilizational, not physiological.  It also proves that European, American, and Oriental peoples may be possessed by the same great ideals of life and principles of action, enabling them to co-operate as nations in great movements to their mutual advantage.

While even we of the West may be long in learning the full significance of what has been and still is taking place in Japan and more conspicuously just now, because more tragically, in China, one thing is clear:  steam and electricity have abolished forever the old isolation of the nations.

Separated branches of the human race that for thousands of years have been undergoing divergent evolution, producing radically different languages, customs, civilizations, systems of thought and world-views, and have resulted even in marked physiological and psychological differences, are now being brought into close contact and inevitable conflict.  But at bottom it is a conflict of ideas, not of races.  The age of isolation and divergent evolution is passing away, and that of international association and convergent social evolution has begun.  Those races and nations that refuse to recognize the new social order, and oppose the cosmic process and its forces, will surely be pushed to the wall and cease to exist as independent nations, just as, in ancient times, the tribes that refused to unite with neighboring tribes were finally subjugated by those that did so unite.

Universal economic, political, intellectual, moral, and religious intercourse is the characteristic of the new aeon on which we are entering.  What are to be the final consequences of this wide intercourse?  Can a people change its character?  Can a nation fully possessed by one type of civilization reject it, and adopt one radically different?  Do races have “souls” which are fixed and incapable of radical transformations?  What has taken place in Japan, a profound, or only a superficial change in psychical character?  Are the destinies of the Oriental races already unalterably determined?

The answers to these questions have already been suggested in the preceding paragraphs, in regard to what has already taken place in Japan.  But we may add that that answer really turns on our conception as to the nature of the characteristics separating the East from the West.  In proportion as national character is reckoned to be biological, will it be considered fixed and the national destiny predetermined.  In proportion as it is reckoned to be sociological, will it be considered alterable and the national destiny subject to new social forces.  Now that the intercourse of widely different races has begun on a scale never