The last part of the picture is the most important: the _lao-pai-hsing_, the Old Hundred Names, the common people of China. They are the ultimate arbiters of this war, and of all future wars in East Asia: to this degree they are a superlative force in the world. Hundreds of millions strong, adept, flexible, trained in a culture which has flowed under (but not through) literacy for centuries, hard-working, patient, and physiologically sound, they are perhaps the greatest unified human group. Upon their anger against Japan depends the future of that Empire; if the _lao-pai-hsing_ are determined to resist, Chiang could go, Chungking fall, the government scatter, the Communists collapse, and there would yet be war--restless, bitter, implacable, with the ferocity of a sane man employing violence as a last defense against violence not sane. Leaders exist aplenty in that sea of men, waiting for circumstance to cast them forth. Intelligence, information, cunning, power, and patience are all at hand. The difference between a strange half-industrial modern Chinese Republic, striding toward the twenty-first century with seven-league boots of progress, and a Chinese chaos stinking with vice and disease under Japanese rule--this difference lies within the decision of the common people. The war has roused the workers, peasants, and petty townsmen. The Japanese bombers have carried ubiquitous messages of alarm. The Western world gasped when across the dusty plains of North China there rolled the tidal wave of Boxerism; but the _I Ho Ch'üan_ of yesteryear is a passing fad in contrast to the bitterness and resolution of today's common people. There is no defeat in most of the faces in Shanghai, no surrender in the eyes of men who live, and must keep on living, surrounded by enemy vainglory. The traitors are marked by their own behavior; they bear the stigmata of a surrender to vice. Yet even they cannot be trusted by Japan. One who has visited the sources and the mouths of the rivers, who has seen the free Yangtze pouring out of Tibet and the captive Yangtze ripple past the grey flanks of Imperial Japanese destroyers, can testify that the Chinese people are not beaten now. If they are ever going to be beaten, it will take a bigger force than Japan to do it--a morally greater, technically surer, politically wiser force.