There is a war play on the boards of one theatre. The heroine, a wife, says that her unborn child in a crisis like this must be a man-child, and that he shall be reared a soldier. To provide means, she will herself, if necessary, go to the yoshiwara. On every gateway is posted a red slab where a man has gone to the war, marked "Gone to the front"--to be supplanted with a black one--"Bravery forever"--should he be brought home dead. And when he is brought home dead his body is received at the station by his kin with proud faces and no tears. The Roman mother has come back to earth again, and it is the Japanese mother who makes Japan the high priestess of patriotism among the nations of the world. In that patriotism are the passionate fealty of the subject to his king, the love of a republic for its flag, and straightway the stranger feels that were the Mikado no more and Japan a republic to-morrow, this war would go on just as it would had the Japanese only this Mikado and no land that he could call his own. The soldier at the front or on the seas will give no better account of himself than the man, woman, or child who is left at home, and a national spirit like this is too beautiful to be lost. Here forks the trail of the Saxon. One branch goes straight to the Philippines. The other splits here into a thousand tiny paths--where railway coach has supplanted the palanquin, battle-ship the war-junk, electricity the pictured lantern; where factory chimneys smoke and the Japanese seems prouder of his commerce than of his art and his exquisite manners; where the boycott has started, and even the word strike--"strikey, strikey" it sounds--has become the refrain of a song. How shallow, after all, the tiny paths are, no man may know; for who can penetrate the mystery of Japanese life and character--a mystery that has been deepening for a thousand years. Here is the chief lodge of the Order of Sealed Lips the world over, and every man, woman, and child in the empire seems born a life-member. It may be Japan who will clasp the hands of the Saxon across this Far East. And yet who knows? Were Mother Nature to found a national museum of the curiosities in plant and tree that humanity has wrested from her, she would give the star-chamber to Japan. This is due, maybe, to the Japanese love of plant and tree and the limitations of space that forbid to both full height. Give the little island room, and the dwarf pine and fruit-tree may become in time, perhaps, as great a curiosity here as elsewhere in the world. What will she do--when she gets the room? The Saxon hands may never meet. Japan Saxonized may, in turn, Saxonize China and throw the tide that has moved east and west, some day, west and east again. II HARDSHIPS OF THE CAMPAIGN I have taken to the big hills in some despair and to rest from the hardships of this campaign. Truly the life of the war correspondent is hard in Japan.