“In conclusion I want to say that this question of duty is a serious one—an exceedingly serious one—one which entirely rests with our Government, and it is not my part to enter into the decision except to present existing conditions. It is the purpose of the Government Steel Works in time to supply the whole demand of the country. This is our ambition, and that is why we are focusing our attention at this moment upon the causes of our inadequate production and failure to make good our initial programme.”
JAPAN IN NOVEMBER
There is no time when Nature is so approachable as in autumn. That season is like the green room of the actress, when she lays aside her stage attire and in deshabille she is communicative and you gain many a secret into her methods and her ideals and aims!
Her laughter is no longer art, but natural, and she shows her foibles and her whims with a childish abandonment. Kamakura has in resume, the exquisite traits of Japanese scenery. The dominating features of the artistic and the diminutive and then the glimpse, just a glimpse of the grand. The sublime is a note I have never heard touched in Japan, except at Port Arthur.
Kamakura has also the needed accessory of a landscape, i. e., historic background. The center of ecclesiastical domination of Buddhism in the middle ages, the spot where the miracle of Nichiren was performed, that beautiful episode which is so often treated in art and which reminds us of those famous martyr dramas dear to the heart of the Christian.
Heaven has not always interceded to save the sainted, and how the heart leaps, when we read of those rare moments, when it has. Nichiren, we are told, was busy during the whole of his time in exile in “teaching, preaching, and itinerating.”
But like many a Christian saint he did not temper his zeal with discretion and was rearrested.
The story is familiar to all, but it is beautiful, and like that of Joan of Arc or Constantine or St. Martin and a host of others, will bear repeating.