It is easy to affirm, in the case of China, the impossibility of any such racial transformation as the one supposed, but fifty years ago it would have been easy to point out its impossibility in the case of Japan—if any human being had had the imagination and hardihood to suggest it. Japan has made the impossible possible, the possible a thing to be feared. As a measure of precaution, the partition of China merits the profoundest consideration. Actual forces at the back of a great movement are seldom apparent to those engaged in directing it. Statesmanship is mostly a matter of temporary expedients for accomplishment of small purposes, but if there is to-day a really great statesman of the Caucasian race he is considering the partition of China among European nations as an alternative to the partition of European nations among the Chinese. Meantime we occupy ourselves with laws and treaties to “exclude” Chinese and other inevitable Asians from our continent. Successive relays of American statesmen wreck themselves upon the problem and go down smiling. To some of us it is given to see that the Asian can not be excluded—that the course of empire, having taken its way westward until it has reached its point of departure, is turning backward, an irresistible “tide in the affairs of men.” But what can we do but propose further and futile measures of “exclusion”? We supplicate our Government to forbid us to employ our destroyers, to deny us the fruits of our cupidity and prohibit us from bringing the hateful race here in our own ships. Our courts, minded madwise, make in good faith the monstrous assumption that the writ of _habeas corpus_ is a right which we, having invented it, are bound to share with races that never heard of it. Our churches, gone clean daft in pursuit of souls never caught and not worth the catching, pull the strings of their God to a gesture of injunction and bid us respect the brotherhood of man. Every moment and at all points we feel the baffling hand thrusting us roughly down and back, while this awful invasion pours in upon us with augmenting power. Not for an instant has the refluent wave been stayed. Every American city has its “Chinatown,” every American village its scouts and pioneers of the movement. On the Pacific Coast the Japanese have a foothold everywhere, monopolizing entire industries in cities and valleys, owning the lands that once they leased and charitably employing their former employers. And all along the line of every growing railway in the west may be seen the turbaned Hindu bending to his work and biding his time to be a “shipper.”