(2) They are extremely selfish, insisting on their own interests,
     but ignoring the interests of all whom they regard as inferiors.

     (3) They are full of racial pride and conceit.  If any concession
     is made to them they demand and take more.

     (4) They are extreme in everything, exceeding the coloured races
     in greatness and wickedness.

     (5) They worship money, and believing that money is the basis of
     everything, will adopt any measures to gain it.

This enumeration of our vices appears to me wholly just.  One might have supposed that a nation which saw us in this light would endeavour to be unlike us.  That, however, is not the moral which the Japanese draw.  They argue, on the contrary, that it is necessary to imitate us as closely as possible.  We shall find that, in the long catalogue of crimes committed by Europeans towards China, there is hardly one which has not been equalled by the Japanese.  It never occurs to a Japanese, even in his wildest dreams, to think of a Chinaman as an equal.  And although he wants the white man to regard himself as an equal, he himself regards Japan as immeasurably superior to any white country.  His real desire is to be above the whites, not merely equal with them.  Count Okuma put the matter very simply in an address given in 1913:—­

The white races regard the world as their property and all other races are greatly their inferiors.  They presume to think that the role of the whites in the universe is to govern the world as they please.  The Japanese were a people who suffered by this policy, and wrongfully, for the Japanese were not inferior to the white races, but fully their equals.  The whites were defying destiny, and woe to them.[58]

It would be easy to quote statements by eminent men to the effect that Japan is the greatest of all nations.  But the same could be said of the eminent men of all other nations down to Ecuador.  It is the acts of the Japanese rather than their rhetoric that must concern us.

The Sino-Japanese war of 1894-5 concerned Korea, with whose internal affairs China and Japan had mutually agreed not to interfere without first consulting each other.  The Japanese claimed that China had infringed this agreement.  Neither side was in the right; it was a war caused by a conflict of rival imperialisms.  The Chinese were easily and decisively defeated, and from that day to this have not ventured to oppose any foreign Power by force of arms, except unofficially in the Boxer rebellion.  The Japanese were, however, prevented from reaping the fruits of their victory by the intervention of Russia, Germany and France, England holding aloof.  The Russians coveted Korea for themselves, the French came in as their allies, and the Germans presumably joined them because of William II’s dread of the Yellow Peril.  However that may be, this intervention made the Russo-Japanese