Whether the Japanese cleverness and progressiveness will last or not, the nation has to be credited with them now as a live asset. But apart from the national character the nation possesses little of "natural capital." There is practically no store of precious metals; a poor supply of the useful minerals; small area of good land; and the local fisheries have been exploited with such energy for many generations that they cannot possibly be expanded in productivity now. The statesmen of New Japan have certainly won some overseas Empire as an addition to the resources available for a sound fabric of national greatness. But what has been won is quite insufficient to weigh in the scale against the "natural capital" of almost any of Japan's rivals in the Pacific. For want of territory to colonise under her own flag, Japan has lost many subjects to alien flags. Japanese settlements of some strength exist on the Pacific coast of America, in the Hawaiian Islands, and in parts of China. There is little doubt that Japanese policy has hoped that in some cases at least her flag would follow her nationals. Talk, not all of it quite irresponsible, has credited Japan with definite designs on many Pacific settlements, especially the Hawaiian Group where her nationals to-day outnumber any other single element of the population. But there are now no islands or territories without a protecting flag. Even when, as was said to be the case with Mexico and another Latin-American country, a weak and friendly nation seems to offer the chance of annexation of territory following a peaceable penetration, there is the power of the United States to interpose a veto. Japan thus cannot add to her natural resources without a war; and she has not, it would seem, sufficient natural resources to back up a war with the enemies she would have to meet now in the Pacific. If she were to put aside dreams of conquest and Empire, has Japan a sound future in the Pacific as a thriving minor manufacturing and trading power? I must say that it seems to me doubtful. The nation has drunk of the wine of life and could hardly settle down to a humdrum existence. No peaceable policy could allow of a great prosperity, for the reasons of natural poverty already stated. It would be a life of drudgery without the present dream of glory. To study the Japanese emigrant away from his own country is to understand that he has not the patience for such a life. In British Columbia, in California, in Hawaii, the same conclusion is come to by European fellow-residents, that the Japanese worker is arrogant, unruly, unreliable. In Japan itself there are signs that the industrial population will not tolerate for ever a life of very poor living and very hard working if there is not a definite and immediate benefit of national glory promised.