“India, the best of India, has lost from her blood that which makes for war and commercial conquests. She is the longest suffering of all the nations. She asks only for peace. Those great playthings of the more material powers--navies, soldiery, colonies, armament--she cannot appreciate, cannot understand. India is not cowardly. You would not call an old man a coward because he rebukes with a smile a young brute who has struck him. Old mystic India prefers to starve rather than to outrage her philosophy with war. She has even adjusted her philosophy to the spectacle of her children starving, rather than to descend to the outgrown ugliness of physical warfare. It has been work of mine to study the nations somewhat, and I have come to think of them as human beings at different ages.... Look at young Japan--the sixteen-year-old among the powers! A brown-skinned, black-eyed boy, cruel, unlit from within, formidable, and itching to use again the strength he has once felt. To the boy-brain, supremacy at war is the highest victory the world can give. Japan has the health of a boy, heals like an earth-worm, and blazes with pride in the possession of his first weapons. Like the boy again, he is blind to the intrinsic rights of women. Shamelessly, he casts his women out over the seven seas to fill the brothels of every port--breeds human cattle to feed the world’s lusts, and knows no prick of pride--but watch him run hot-breathed to the rifle-pits if so much as a bit of humor from an outside nation stirs the restless chip upon his shoulder! Brute boy, Japan, the trophies of conquests are as yet but incidents to him. The soldier is in highest manifestation; the expansionist not yet weaned. He fights for the great glory of the fight--mad with the direct and awful lust of standing in the midst of the fallen....