ethics of business, than has the Japanese.  He has learned, as a matter of course, to keep his word or his bond.  As yet, the Japanese business man has failed to understand this.  When he has signed a time contract and when changing conditions cause him to lose by it, the Japanese merchant cannot understand why he should live up to his contract.  It is beyond his comprehension and repulsive to his common sense that he should live up to his contract and thereby lose money.  He firmly believes that the changing conditions themselves absolve him.  And in so far adaptable as he has shown himself to be in other respects, he fails to grasp a radically new idea where the Chinese succeeds.

Here we have the Chinese, four hundred millions of him, occupying a vast land of immense natural resources—­resources of a twentieth-century age, of a machine age; resources of coal and iron, which are the backbone of commercial civilization.  He is an indefatigable worker.  He is not dead to new ideas, new methods, new systems.  Under a capable management he can be made to do anything.  Truly would he of himself constitute the much-heralded Yellow Peril were it not for his present management.  This management, his government, is set, crystallized.  It is what binds him down to building as his fathers built.  The governing class, entrenched by the precedent and power of centuries and by the stamp it has put upon his mind, will never free him.  It would be the suicide of the governing class, and the governing class knows it.

Comes now the Japanese.  On the streets of Antung, of Feng-Wang-Chang, or of any other Manchurian city, the following is a familiar scene:  One is hurrying home through the dark of the unlighted streets when he comes upon a paper lantern resting on the ground.  On one side squats a Chinese civilian on his hams, on the other side squats a Japanese soldier.  One dips his forefinger in the dust and writes strange, monstrous characters.  The other nods understanding, sweeps the dust slate level with his hand, and with his forefinger inscribes similar characters.  They are talking.  They cannot speak to each other, but they can write.  Long ago one borrowed the other’s written language, and long before that, untold generations ago, they diverged from a common root, the ancient Mongol stock.

There have been changes, differentiations brought about by diverse conditions and infusions of other blood; but down at the bottom of their being, twisted into the fibres of them, is a heritage in common—­a sameness in kind which time has not obliterated.  The infusion of other blood, Malay, perhaps, has made the Japanese a race of mastery and power, a fighting race through all its history, a race which has always despised commerce and exalted fighting.