Japan has borrowed what seemed to her leaders to be the best of everything in foreign countries.  They analyzed the military, political, and industrial successes of their friends and enemies, satisfactorily explained and duly fructified them.  They use the school as the seed-plot of the state, and inculcate conceptions there which the entire community endeavors later on to embody in acts and institutions.  And what the elementary school has begun, the intermediate, the technical, and the high schools develop and perfect, aided by the press, which is encouraged by the state.

Japan’s ideal cannot be offhandedly condemned as immoral, pernicious, or illegitimate.  Its partizans pertinently invoke every principle which their Allies applied to their own aims and strivings.  And men of deeper insight than those who preside over the fortunes of the Entente to-day recognize that Europeans of high principles and discerning minds, who perceive the central issues, would, were they in the position of the Japanese statesmen, likewise bend their energies to the achievement of the same aims.

The Japanese argue their case somewhat as follows: 

“We are determined to help China to put herself in line with ourselves, and to keep her from falling into anarchy.  And no one can honestly deny our qualifications.  We and they have very much in common, and we understand them as no Anglo-Saxon or other foreign people can.  On the one hand our own past experience resembles that of the Middle Kingdom, and on the other our method of adapting ourselves to the new international conditions challenged and received the ungrudging admiration of a world disposed to be critical.  The Peking treaties of May, 1915, between China and Japan, and the pristine drafts of them which were modified before signature, enable the outsider to form a fairly accurate opinion of Japan’s economic and political program, which amounts to the application of a Far Eastern Monroe Doctrine.

“What we seek to obtain in the Far East is what the Western Powers have secured throughout the remainder of the globe:  the right to contribute to the moral and intellectual progress of our backward neighbors, and to profit by our exertions.  China needs the help which we are admittedly able to bestow.  To our mission no cogent objection has ever been offered.  No Cabinet in Tokio has ever looked upon the Middle Realm as a possible colony for the Japanese.  The notion is preposterous, seeing that China is already over-populated.  What Japan sorely needs are sources whence to draw coal and iron for industrial enterprise.  She also needs cotton and leather.”