The foregoing essay was written two years ago. Later political events and the signing of new treaties obliged me to remodel it last year; and now, while the proofs are passing through my hands, the events of the war with China compel some further remarks. What none could have predicted in 1893 the whole world recognizes in 1895 with astonishment and with admiration. Japan has won in her jiujutsu. Her autonomy is practically restored, her place among civilized nations seems to be assured: she has passed forever out of Western tutelage. What neither her arts nor her virtues could ever have gained for her, she has obtained by the very first display of her new scientific powers of aggression and destruction.
Not a little has been hastily said about long secret preparation for the war made by Japan, and about the flimsiness of her pretexts for entering upon it. I believe that the purposes of her military preparations were never other than those indicated in the preceding chapter. It was to recover her independence that Japan steadily cultivated her military strength for twenty-five years. But successive pulses of popular reaction against foreign influence during that period—each stronger than the preceding—warned the Government of the nation's growing consciousness of power and of its ever-increasing irritation against the treaties. The reaction of 1893-94 took so menacing a form through the House of Representatives that the dissolution of the Diet became an immediate necessity. But even repeated parliamentary dissolutions could only have postponed the issue. It has since been averted partly by the new treaties, and partly by the sudden loosening of the Empire's military force against China. Should it not be obvious that only the merciless industrial and political pressure exercised by a combined Occident against Japan really compelled this war,—as a manifestation of force in the direction of least resistance? Happily that manifestation has been effectual. Japan has proved herself able to hold her own against the world. She has no wish to break her industrial relations with the Occident unless further imposed upon; but with the military revival of her Empire it is almost certain that the day of Occidental influence upon her—whether direct or indirect—is definitely over. Further anti-foreign reaction may be expected in the natural order of things,—not necessarily either violent or unreasonable, but embodying the fullest reassertion of national individuality. Some change even in the form of government is not impossible, considering the questionable results of experimentation with Constitutional Government made by a people accustomed for untold centuries to autocratic rule. But the fallacy of Sir Harry Parkes's prediction that Japan would become "a South American republic" warns against ventures to anticipate the future of this wonderful and enigmatic race.
It is true that the war is not yet over;—but the ultimate triumph of Japan seems beyond doubt,—even allowing for the formidable chances of a revolution in China. The world is already asking with some anxiety what will come next? Perhaps the compulsion of the most peaceable and most conservative of all nations, under both Japanese and Occidental pressure, to really master our arts of war in self-defense. After that perhaps a great military awakening of China, who would be quite likely, under the same circumstances as made New Japan, to turn her arms South and West. For possible ultimate consequences, consult Dr. Pearson's recent book, National Character.
It is to be remembered that the art of jiujutsu was invented in China. And the West has yet to reckon with China,—China, the ancient teacher of Japan,—China, over whose changeless millions successive storms of conquest have passed only as a wind over reeds. Under compulsion, indeed, she may be forced, like Japan, to defend her integrity by jiujutsu. But the end of that prodigious jiujutsu might have results the most serious for the entire world. It might be reserved for China to avenge all those aggressions, extortions, exterminations, of which the colonizing West has been guilty in dealing with feebler races.
Already thinkers, summarizing the experience of the two great colonizing nations,—thinkers not to be ignored, both French and English,—have predicted that the earth will never be fully dominated by the races of the West, and that the future belongs to the Orient. Such, too, are the convictions of many who have learned by long sojourn in the East to see beneath the surface of that strange humanity so utterly removed from us in thought,—to comprehend the depth and force of its tides of life,—to understand its immeasurable capacities of assimilation,—to discern its powers of self-adaptation to almost any environment between the arctic and antarctic circles. And in the judgment of such observers nothing less than the extermination of a race comprising more than one third of the world's population could now assure us even of the future of our own civilization.
Perhaps, as has been recently averred by Dr. Pearson, the long history of Western expansion and aggression is even now approaching its close. Perhaps our civilization has girdled the earth only to force the study of our arts of destruction and our arts of industrial competition upon races much more inclined to use them against us than for us. Even to do this we had to place most of the world under tribute,—so colossal were the powers needed. Perhaps we could not have attempted less, because the tremendous social machinery we have created, threatens, like the Demon of the old legend, to devour us in the same hour that we can find no more tasks for it.
A wondrous creation, indeed, this civilization of ours,—ever growing higher out of an abyss of ever-deepening pain; but it seems also to many not less monstrous than wonderful. That it may crumble suddenly in a social earthquake has long been the evil dream of those who dwell in its summits. That as a social structure it cannot endure, by reason of its moral foundation, is the teaching of Oriental wisdom.
Certainly the results of its labors cannot pass away till man shall have fully played out the drama of his existence upon this planet. It has resurrected the past;—it has revived the languages of the dead;—it has wrested countless priceless secrets from Nature;—it has analyzed suns and vanquished space and time;—it has compelled the invisible to become visible;—it has torn away all veils save the veil of the Infinite;—it has founded ten thousand systems of knowledge;—it has expanded the modern brain beyond the cubic capacity of the mediæval skull;—it has evolved the most noble, even if it has also evolved the most detestable, forms of individuality;—it has developed the most exquisite sympathies and the loftiest emotions known to man, even though it has developed likewise forms of selfishness and of suffering impossible in other eras. Intellectually it has grown beyond the altitude of the stars. That it must, in any event, bear to the future a relation incomparably vaster than that of Greek civilization to the past, is impossible to disbelieve.
But more and more each year it exemplifies the law that the greater the complexity of an organism, the greater also its susceptibility to fatal hurt Always, as its energies increase, is there evolved within it a deeper, a keener, a more exquisitely ramified sensibility to every shock or wound,—to every exterior force of change. Already the mere results of a drought or a famine in the remotest parts of the earth, the destruction of the smallest centre of supply, the exhaustion of a mine, the least temporary stoppage of any commercial vein or artery, the slightest pressure upon any industrial nerve, may produce disintegrations that carry shocks of pain into every portion of the enormous structure. And the wondrous capacity of that structure to oppose exterior forces by corresponding changes within itself would appear to be now endangered by internal changes of a totally different character. Certainly our civilization is developing the individual more and more. But is it not now developing him much as artificial heat and colored light and chemical nutrition might develop a plant under glass? Is it not rapidly evolving millions into purely special fitness for conditions impossible to maintain,—of luxury without limit for the few, of merciless servitude to steel and steam for the many? To such doubts the reply has been given that social transformations will supply the means of providing against perils, and of recuperating all losses. That, for a time at least, social reforms will work miracles is much more than a hope. But the ultimate problem of our future seems to be one that no conceivable social change can happily solve,—not even supposing possible the establishment of an absolutely perfect communism,—because the fate of the higher races seems to depend upon their true value in the future economy of Nature. To the query, "Are we not the Superior Race?"—we may emphatically answer "Yes;" but this affirmative will not satisfactorily answer a still more important question, "Are we the fittest to survive?"
Wherein consists the fitness for survival? In the capacity of self-adaptation to any and every environment;—in the instantaneous ability to face the unforeseen;—in the inherent power to meet and to master all opposing natural influences. And surely not in the mere capacity to adapt ourselves to factitious environments of our own invention, or to abnormal influences of our own manufacture,—but only in the simple power to live. Now in this simple power of living, our so-called higher races are immensely inferior to the races of the Far East. Though the physical energies and the intellectual resources of the Occidental exceed those of the Oriental, they can be maintained only at an expense totally incommensurate with the racial advantage. For the Oriental has proved his ability to study and to master the results of our science upon a diet of rice, and on as simple a diet can learn to manufacture and to utilize our most complicated inventions. But the Occidental cannot even live except at a cost sufficient for the maintenance of twenty Oriental lives. In our very superiority lies the secret of our fatal weakness. Our physical machinery requires a fuel too costly to pay for the running of it in a perfectly conceivable future period of race-competition and pressure of population.