We have had Africa for the Afrikander, and at no distant day we shall hear “Asia for the Asiatic!” Four hundred million indefatigable workers (deft, intelligent, and unafraid to die), aroused and rejuvenescent, managed and guided by forty-five million additional human beings who are splendid fighting animals, scientific and modern, constitute that menace to the Western world which has been well named the “Yellow Peril.”  The possibility of race adventure has not passed away.  We are in the midst of our own.  The Slav is just girding himself up to begin.  Why may not the yellow and the brown start out on an adventure as tremendous as our own and more strikingly unique?

The ultimate success of such an adventure the Western mind refuses to consider.  It is not the nature of life to believe itself weak.  There is such a thing as race egotism as well as creature egotism, and a very good thing it is.  In the first place, the Western world will not permit the rise of the yellow peril.  It is firmly convinced that it will not permit the yellow and the brown to wax strong and menace its peace and comfort.  It advances this idea with persistency, and delivers itself of long arguments showing how and why this menace will not be permitted to arise.  Today, far more voices are engaged in denying the yellow peril than in prophesying it.  The Western world is warned, if not armed, against the possibility of it.

In the second place, there is a weakness inherent in the brown man which will bring his adventure to naught.  From the West he has borrowed all our material achievement and passed our ethical achievement by.  Our engines of production and destruction he has made his.  What was once solely ours he now duplicates, rivalling our merchants in the commerce of the East, thrashing the Russian on sea and land.  A marvellous imitator truly, but imitating us only in things material.  Things spiritual cannot be imitated; they must be felt and lived, woven into the very fabric of life, and here the Japanese fails.

It required no revolution of his nature to learn to calculate the range and fire a field gun or to march the goose-step.  It was a mere matter of training.  Our material achievement is the product of our intellect.  It is knowledge, and knowledge, like coin, is interchangeable.  It is not wrapped up in the heredity of the new-born child, but is something to be acquired afterward.  Not so with our soul stuff, which is the product of an evolution which goes back to the raw beginnings of the race.  Our soul stuff is not a coin to be pocketed by the first chance comer.  The Japanese cannot pocket it any more than he can thrill to short Saxon words or we can thrill to Chinese hieroglyphics.  The leopard cannot change its spots, nor can the Japanese, nor can we.  We are thumbed by the ages into what we are, and by no conscious inward effort can we in a day rethumb ourselves.  Nor can the Japanese in a day, or a generation, rethumb himself in our image.