Progress and Achievements of the Colored People / Containing the Story of the Wonderful Advancement of the Colored Americans—the Most Marvelous in the History of Nations—Their Past Accomplishments, Together With Their Present-day Opportunities and a Glimpse Into the Future for Further Developments—the Dawn of a Triumphant Era. A Handbook for Self-improvement Which Leads to Greater Success

by Kelly Miller; Joseph R. Gay

THE CASE OF THE JAPANESE

The marvelous rise of the Japanese is due to the seizure of the opportunity of education, and appropriating every detail that goes to make power and physical influence.

Not much more than three generations ago, the Japanese empire was a mere name, an isolated country of semi-barbarians, a mere tribe without power, influence or standing as a national unit. It is now clamoring at the door of every civilized nation for recognition as a world power, and threatens to enforce its demands with an army and navy that is too formidable to be ignored or slighted.

It has reached the acme of the physical and lays claim to that alone as its right to recognition. It has not yet learned that in the great movement of the peoples of the earth toward unification, the physical must go down before the psychological, and therefore, if the Japanese persist in their physical prowess, they will disappear as have other greater nations claiming the same force as the summit of earthly influence. They are mere fragments of a tribe detached from the Turanian division of the human family.

History repeats itself always in the cases of the great divisions of the human family, where some branch attempted to usurp the power, functions and authority of the whole.

The Assyrians, the Persians, the mighty mistress of the world, the Roman Empire, vanished like a breath when they presumed to stand in the way of the designs of the Almighty.

All were pawns upon the chessboard of time, so to speak, the very foundation of which is soul, that attempted to wrest the fiat from its meaning by the adoption of brute or national force.

They served the purpose of carrying man toward a certain goal on the way to his final pinnacle, then claimed the results of the uplift, and went down through vanity and presumption.

Japan with its physical impress persisted in, will go down like the rest. It must go down because it does not represent any factor in the Divine designs. But it is an illustration of what education will accomplish, and its fate will illustrate what human nature, obsessed by its own reliance upon force, will reach in the end.

Our Colored Americans have no such incentive as force or physical designs. The conquerors of the earth were compelled to yield to the educational programme to uplift the soul of man, not his material prospects, except so far as they advanced the psychological, and they may be said to be now in that psychological phase of the movement of the nations of the earth, which leads to the highest point of intensive civilization.