It is true that the steamers of the San Francisco and San Diego lines, especially those carrying mails and passengers, go and come via Honolulu, so that the voyage to Japan thus requires a few more days than the direct trip would take. But, as Hawaii is now part of the United States, our country has thus become only about 10 days distant from Japan. Moreover, as the Philippine Islands are also a portion of our country, and Formosa has been for several years a part, of Japan, the territories of the two nations are brought almost within a stone’s throw, and the people almost within speaking distance, of each other. This proximity of the two nations to each other should be an incentive to draw even more closely together the ties, not only historical, commercial, and material, but also political, social, educational, intellectual, moral, and religious, that bind them to each other, and, so far as possible, to make “Japan and America all the same heart.” But Japan is also an Asiatic country, and thus holds a peculiar relation to the countries on the eastern coast of the mainland of Asia. The islands of Japan stretch along that shore in close proximity to Siberia, Korea, and China, and are not far distant from Siam. With all of those countries she enters, therefore, into most intimate relationship of many kinds. With Russia the relation is one of rivalry, of more or less hostility, at present passive, but likely to be aroused into activity by some unusually exasperating event. In any case, Japan is the only Far-Eastern power that can be relied upon to check the aggressions of Russia; and this fact the wise statesmen of Great Britain have clearly recognized by entering into the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Toward Korea, China, and Siam, Japan sustains a natural position of leadership, because she is far in advance of all those nations in civilization. Ties geographical, racial, social, political, intellectual, and religious, bind them more or less closely together, so that Japan can more sympathetically and thus more easily lead them out into the path of progress. The natural and common routes of trade and travel from the United States to those countries run via Japan, which thus becomes, in more senses than one, “the key of Asia”; and for that very reason she is also the logical mediator between the East and the West.