Yet another kind of conservation to which our people in Occidental lands need to give more earnest heed is the conservation of the individual wealth of the people. The wastefulness of the average American is apparent enough from a comparison of conditions here with conditions in Europe--when I came back from my first European trip I remarked that "Europe would live on what America wastes"--but a comparison of conditions in America with those in the Orient is even more to our discredit. In Lafcadio Hearn's books on Japan we find a glorification of the Japanese character that is unquestionably overdone on the whole, but in his contrast between the wasteful display of fashion's fevered followers in America and the ideals of simple living that distinguished old Japan, there is a rebuke for us whose justice we cannot gainsay. Take an old Japanese sage like Baron Shibusawa, who, like Count Okuma, it seems might well have been one of Plutarch's men, and you are not surprised to hear him mention the extravagance of America as the thing that impressed him more {265} than anything else in traveling in our country. "To spend so much money in making a mere railroad station palatial as you have done in Washington, for example, seems to me uneconomic," he declared.
What most impressed him and other Oriental critics with whom I talked, be it remembered, was the wastefulness of expenditures not for genuine comforts but for fashion and display--the vagaries of idle rich women who pay high prices for half-green strawberries in January but are hunting some other exotic diet when the berries get deliciously ripe in May, and who rave over an American Beauty in December but have no eyes for the full-blown glory of the open-air roses in June. It is such unnatural display that most grates against the "moral duty of simplicity of life," as Eastern sages have taught it.
"When I was in the Imperial University here in Tokyo," a Japanese newspaper man said to me, "my father gave me six yen a month, $3 American money. I paid for room, light, and food $1.20 a month; for tuition, 50 cents; for paper, books, etc., 30 cents; and this left me $1 for pocket money expenditures, including the occasional treat of eating potatoes with sugar!" In such Spartan simplicity the victors of Mukden, Liao-yang and Port Arthur were bred.
The great founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, Iyeyasu, whose tomb at Nikko situated at the end of a twenty-five mile avenue of giant cryptomerias, is the Mecca of all tourists, has expressed in two memorable sayings the Japanese conception of the essential immorality of waste, of the regard that is due every product of human labor as being itself in some sense human or at least a throb with the blood of the toiler who has wrought it and moist with the sweat of his brow. When virtual dictator of Japan, Iyeyasu was seen smoothing out an old silk kakama. "I am doing this," he said, "not because of the worth of the garment in itself, but because of what it needed to produce it. It is the result of the toil of some poor woman, and that is why I value it. If we do not think while {266} using these things, of the toil and effort required to produce them, then our want of consideration puts us on a level with the beasts." Again, when opposing unnecessary purchases of costly royal garments, he declared. "When I think of the multitudes around me, and the generations to come after me, I feel it my duty to be very sparing, for their sake, of the goods in my possession."
No wonder Hearn declares of this "cosmic emotion of humanity" which we lack that "we shall certainly be obliged to acquire it at a later date simply to save ourselves from extermination."
The importance of saving the wealth of nations from the wastes of war and the wastes of excessive military expenditures is another lesson that one brings home from a study of conditions abroad. While our American jingoes are using Japan as a more or less effective bogy to work their purposes, peace advocates might perhaps even more legitimately hold it up as a "horrible example" to point their moral as to how war drains the national revenues and exhausts the national wealth. In the Mikado's empire the average citizen to-day must pay 30 per cent, of his total income in taxes, the great proportion of this enormous national expenditure growing out of past wars and preparations for future wars. No wonder venerable Count Okuma, once Premier of the Empire, said to me: "I look for international arbitration to come not as a matter of sentiment but as a matter of cold financial necessity. Nations have labored for centuries to build up the civilization of to-day: it is unthinkable that its advantages must be largely sacrificed for the support of enormous non-productive armies and navies. That would be simply the Suicide of Civilization."
For the lesson of all this I may quote the words of Dr. Timothy Richard, one of the most distinguished Englishmen in China, in the same conversation from which a fragment was quoted in the beginning of this article:
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"The world is going to be one before you die, sir," he said as we talked together just outside the walls of the Forbidden City. "We are living in the days of anarchy. Unite the ten leading nations; let all their armaments be united into one to enforce the decrees of the Supreme Court of the World. And since it will then be the refusal of recalcitrant nations to accept arbitration that will make necessary the maintenance of any very large armaments by these united nations, let them protect themselves by levying discriminating tariff duties against the countries that would perpetuate present conditions."
All this I endorse. The necessity of preserving the national wealth from the wastes of war I regard as one of the most important lessons that we may get from the Orient. And yet I would not have the United States risk entering upon that military unpreparedness which must prove a fool's paradise until other great nations are brought to accept the principle of arbitration. The proper programme is to increase by tenfold--yes, a hundredfold--our personal and national efforts for arbitration, at the same time remembering that so long as the community of nations recognizes the Rule of Force we cannot secede and set up a reign of peace for ourselves. If it takes two to make a quarrel, it also takes two to keep a peace. We must be in terrible earnest about bringing in a new era, and yet we cannot commit the folly of trying to play the peace game by ourselves. It is not solitaire.