Japanese spies have been captured in Ecuador and Mexico. At the centennial fêtes of Mexico and the Argentine in 1910 a Japanese cruiser and an ambassador of the Mikado brought fraternal messages from the Orient. Uneasy on account of the North American peril, certain writers of the Latin American democracies entertain a certain amount of confidence in the sympathies of Japan; perhaps they even count upon an alliance with the Empire of the Rising Sun. But we cannot see, with the brilliant Argentine writer Manuel Ugarte, that Latin diplomacy must henceforth count upon Japan, because the hostility between that nation and the United States might be successfully exploited at the proper moment. In the commercial battles for the domination of the Pacific Japan does not support the autonomy of Latin America; her statesmen and publicists consider that Peru, Chili, and Mexico are spheres of Japanese expansion. We have cited conclusive opinions on this subject, and they contradict the optimism of the Argentine sociologist. Apart from the emigrants and the companies which encourage them the projects and designs of Count Okuma, leader of the Japanese imperialists, are manifested in the nationalist Press, which sometimes betrays more than it intends. To-day, in the face of the unanimous opinion of these journals, we cannot deny that Japan has ambitious designs upon America. The future war will be born of the clash of two doctrines, of two imperialisms, of the ideal of Okuma and the Monroe doctrine. Victorious, the Japanese would invade Western America and convert the Pacific into a vast closed {330} sea, closed to foreign ambitions, _mare nostrum_, peopled by Japanese colonies.[4] The Japanese hegemony would not be a mere change of tutelage for the nations of America. In spite of essential differences the Latins oversea have certain common ties with the people of the States: a long-established religion, Christianity, and a coherent, European, occidental civilisation. Perhaps there is some obscure fraternity between the Japanese and the American Indians, between the yellow men of Nippon and the copper-coloured Quechuas, a disciplined and sober people. But the ruling race, the dominant type of Spanish origin, which imposes the civilisation of the white man upon America, is hostile to the entire invading East.