per se, does not exist.  Only exists the honour of the State, which is his honour.  He does not look upon himself as a free agent, working out his own personal salvation.  Spiritual agonizing is unknown to him.  He has a “sense of calm trust in fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, a stoic composure in sight of danger or calamity, a disdain of life and friendliness with death.”  He relates himself to the State as, amongst bees, the worker is related to the hive; himself nothing, the State everything; his reasons for existence the exaltation and glorification of the State.

The most admired quality to-day of the Japanese is his patriotism.  The Western world is in rhapsodies over it, unwittingly measuring the Japanese patriotism by its own conceptions of patriotism.  “For God, my country, and the Czar!” cries the Russian patriot; but in the Japanese mind there is no differentiation between the three.  The Emperor is the Emperor, and God and country as well.  The patriotism of the Japanese is blind and unswerving loyalty to what is practically an absolutism.  The Emperor can do no wrong, nor can the five ambitious great men who have his ear and control the destiny of Japan.

No great race adventure can go far nor endure long which has no deeper foundation than material success, no higher prompting than conquest for conquest’s sake and mere race glorification.  To go far and to endure, it must have behind it an ethical impulse, a sincerely conceived righteousness.  But it must be taken into consideration that the above postulate is itself a product of Western race-egotism, urged by our belief in our own righteousness and fostered by a faith in ourselves which may be as erroneous as are most fond race fancies.  So be it.  The world is whirling faster to-day than ever before.  It has gained impetus.  Affairs rush to conclusion.  The Far East is the point of contact of the adventuring Western people as well as of the Asiatic.  We shall not have to wait for our children’s time nor our children’s children.  We shall ourselves see and largely determine the adventure of the Yellow and the Brown.

Feng-Wang-Cheng, Manchuria. 
June 1904,

WHAT LIFE MEANS TO ME

I was born in the working-class.  Early I discovered enthusiasm, ambition, and ideals; and to satisfy these became the problem of my child-life.  My environment was crude and rough and raw.  I had no outlook, but an uplook rather.  My place in society was at the bottom.  Here life offered nothing but sordidness and wretchedness, both of the flesh and the spirit; for here flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented.