Even more important, whether we consider it from the standpoint of the general welfare or as a matter of national defence, is the conservation of our physical stamina and racial strength. Whether the wars of the future are commercial or military it doesn't matter. The prizes will go to the people who are strong of body and clear of mind. "The first requisite," said Herbert Spencer, "is a good animal," and not even the success of a Peace Court will ever prevent the good animal--the power of physical vigor and hardness with its {268} concomitant qualities of courage, discipline, and daring--from becoming a deciding factor in the struggle between nations and between races. It has been so from the dawn of history and it will ever be so.
And just here we may question whether the growth of wealth and luxury in the United States is not tending here, as it has tended in all other nations, toward physical softness and deterioration. It may be argued on the contrary that while a few Occidental children are luxury-weakened, a great body of Oriental children are drudgery-weakened. But is there not much more reason to fear that in our case there is really decay at both ends of our social system--with the pampered rich children who haven't work enough, and with the hard-driven poor who have too much? The overworking of the very young is certainly a serious evil in America as well as in Asia; and even in this matter the Eastern folk are perhaps doing as well, according to their lights, as we are. In China manufacturing is not yet extensive enough for the problem to be serious; but in both Japan and India I found the government councils thoroughly aroused to the importance of conserving child-life, and grappling with different measures for the protection of both child and women workers. My recollection is that the four thousand brown-bodied Hindu boys (there were no girls) that I found at work in a Madras cotton mill already have better legal protection than is afforded the child-workers in some of our American states.
For a long time, too, we have been accustomed to think of the Oriental as the victim of enervating habits and more or less vicious forms of self-indulgence. But while this may have been true in the past, the tide is now definitely turning. Fifty years of agitation in the United States have probably accomplished less to minimize intemperance among us than ten years of anti-opium agitation has accomplished in ridding China of her particular form of intemperance. I went to China too late to see the once famous opium dens of Canton and Peking; {269} too late to see the gorgeous poppy-fields that once lined the banks of the Yangtze; and on the billboards in Newchang I found such notices as the following concerning morphine, cocaine and similar drugs:
"In accordance with instructions received through the Inspector-General from the Shuiwu Ch'u the public is hereby notified that henceforth the importation into China of cocaine ... or instruments for its use, except by foreign medical practitioners and foreign druggists for medical purposes, is hereby prohibited."
And these foreign doctors handling cocaine are heavily bonded. The Chinaman of to-day is giving up opium, is little given to other forms of intemperance, is afire with new enthusiasm for athletics and for military training; and he is already so physically adaptable that I found him as hardy and untiringly energetic beneath an equatorial sun in Singapore as in the rigorous climate of north-central Manchuria. It made me wonder if the "meek who are to inherit the earth" in the end may not prove to be the Chinese!
Perhaps if the United States were a less powerful nation, or if we realized more fully the keenness of the coming world-struggle for industrial supremacy, we might find our patriotism a stronger force in warding off some of the evils that now threaten us. In his address to the German navy, Emperor William recently urged the importance of temperance because of the empire's need of strong, clear-headed men, unweakened by dissipation; and there can be little doubt that some such patriotic motive has had not a little to do with the anti-opium movement in awakening China. Certainly the Japanese with their almost fanatical love of country are easily influenced by such appeals, and keep such reasons in mind in the training of their young. "For the sake of the Emperor you must not drink the water from these condemned wells; for the sake of the Emperor you must observe these sanitary precautions--lest you start an epidemic and so weaken the {270} Emperor's fighting forces!" So said the Japanese sanitary officers in the war with Russia; and when the struggle ended Surgeon-General Takaki was able to boast in his official report:
"In the Spanish-American War fourteen men died from disease to one from bullets. We have established a record of four deaths from disease to one from bullets."
In studying these Eastern peoples one is also led inevitably to such reflections as Mr. Roosevelt gave utterance to in his Romanes lectures a few months ago. Not only are the Orientals schooled from their youth up to endure hardness like good soldiers, but their natural increase contrasts strikingly with the steadily decreasing birth-rate of our French and English stocks. In Japan I soon came to remark that it looked almost as unnatural to see a woman between twenty and forty without a baby on her back as it would to see a camel without a hump; and Kipling's saying about the Japanese "four-foot child who walks with a three-foot child who is holding the hand of a two-foot child who carries on her back a one-foot child" came promptly to mind. In view of these things it is not surprising to learn that in the last fifty years Japan has increased in population, through the birth rate alone, "as fast as the United States has gained from the birth rate plus her enormous immigration." The racial fertility of the Chinese is also well known; a Chinaman without sons to worship his spirit when he dies is not only temporarily discredited but eternally doomed. As for India, that every Hindu girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a widow is a common saying, and readers of "Kim" and "The Naulahka" will recall the ancient and persistent belief that the wife who is not also a mother of sons is a woman of ill-omen.
Mr. Putman Weale abundantly justifies the title of his new book, "The Conflict of Color"--the seeming foreordination of some readjustment of racial relations if present tendencies continue--when he asserts that while the white races double {271} in eighty years, the yellow or brown double in sixty, and the black in forty.
This last consideration, that of a possible readjustment of racial relations, leads us very naturally to inquire, What are the qualities that have given the white race the leadership thus far? And what may we do for the conservation of these qualities?