The interesting question now suggests itself of what would happen if some man should some day discover accidentally a means of disintegrating--say carbon--and should unintentionally disintegrate a few tons of coal in Wall Street. We know what has happened at times when piles of explosives have been accidentally detonated. But explosives are merely chemical compounds, and, compared to atoms of radium are relatively microscopic in the energy developed when broken up. We remember the story of the commotion caused by the monk's experiment in making powder, when the mixture exploded and hurled the pestle out of the mortar and across the room. Imagine a few tons of carbon atoms exploding. In 1894 a war, long presaged, broke out between China and Japan. In 1854, when Commodore Perry went to Japan, and gave a virtual ultimatum that resulted in Japan's opening her seaports to the commerce of the world, China and Japan were on the same plane of civilization, though China was many times greater in area and population. But the people of Japan were different from those of China in the essential mental characteristic of imagination,--at least their rulers were. For those rulers, noting the superior power of the foreign war-ships as compared with theirs, and reasoning from this to the conditions of the countries that produced those war-ships, and that produced also the implements of war on board that were so much superior to the Japanese, made a mental picture of what would happen to Japan some day, when those war-ships should come to Japan and demand submission. To make such a picture did not require much imagination, maybe; but the fact seems to be that no other Asiatic nation, and no African nation, made it. Then the Japanese made another picture, that required imagination of a brilliant kind; and that was a picture of Japan learning the arts of the foreign devil, and then utilizing those arts to keep the foreign devil himself at bay. To us, looking back on the perfectly clear record of performance that Japan has made since then, that performance may seem not very difficult either to attempt or to achieve. But no other nation in the history of the world has ever paralleled it, or even approximated it. To appreciate it, one must exert all the imagination of which he is capable, and see himself in Japan as Japan was in 1854, amid all the influences of the history and environment then prevailing, with all their accompaniments of ignorance, prejudice, inertia and racial pride. It is the consensus of opinion throughout the world that the performance of Japan since 1854 has been amazing. It is part of the humble effort of this book to show that, in all great achievements, the result should be attributed mainly to the estimate originally formed of the situation, and the decision (invention) made to meet it. "C'est le _premier_ pas qui coute": the rest follow as results.