Marshal Yamagata emphatically repudiated the allegation that he had advocated peace on the ground of the difficulty of further continuing the war because of the inadequacy of the country’s military strength. “The assertion,” he said, “reflects upon the prestige of the army and cannot be passed over unnoticed. The Government prosecuted the war with the greatest determination, and is still competent to carry it on. I have been in the military service over forty years, and have been through several wars. We have experienced greater difficulties in other wars than in the one with Russia, though the wars of the past were of less magnitude. We have always managed to overcome difficulties.”
It will be admitted that this speech was not conceived in any spirit of boastfulness, but that it was a plain unvarnished statement of fact. Japan was by no means exhausted by the struggle with Russia,—on the other hand, nothing was to be gained by prolonging it to exhaustion point.
The combination of soldier and politician is not so uncommon that it need occasion remark to find it exemplified in the case of Marshal Yamagata, whose abilities as a leader in the field have been almost equalled, though they could not be surpassed, by his talents as chief of a numerous and powerful party in the State. He is the acknowledged head of the Japanese Conservatives, and has served his country as Prime Minister with signal success. He always displayed a perfect genius for organisation, and in the Parliamentary arena he shone as brilliantly as in the “tented field.” But for all that it is not for one moment to be imagined that he is in the usually accepted meaning of the word a parliamentarian. He is not, strictly speaking, a politician or party man at all. When he was originally invited to form a Ministry he accepted the task, not from a desire to achieve political success, but in order that he might, if possible, be the means of removing from the arena of party conflict those great questions that were at the period alluded to becoming daily of real importance to the nation at large. He has ever set his face sternly against the subordination of national interests to the ambitions of a party. He is essentially a soldier, and his heart is with the army, on which he bases his hopes for the future eminence among the powers of that country which it was called into being to protect. And Marshal Yamagata has every right to be proud of that magnificent force the enrolment of which he so strenuously advocated from the very first, and to the complete organisation of which he has entirely devoted his energies for forty years. True it is that he received the utmost help in this great work,—one surely worthy of a life’s continuous effort,—from those military and other experts from the Occident whose services he had known how to secure, and that this loyally rendered assistance was at all times recognised by him. It was none the less a result of his personal and unflagging zeal that the course of training for the army, once entered on, was never suffered to deviate a hair’s-breadth from the plan on which it had been determined that the vast structure should in the main be raised.
Two maxims have always had weight with him, and he has steadfastly inculcated their observance by every individual in the army in which he takes such justifiable pride: they are:—
Gi wo mite, nasazaru wa, yu naki nari.
(Duty recognised, but unfulfilled, means lack of courage.)
Gi wo omonzuru koto tai-san no gotoku
Shi wo karonzuru koto, ko-bo no gotoshi.
(Duty should weigh (with us) as the mass of a lofty mountain:
Against it, our lives resemble in lightness the swan’s down.)