It was Perry, therefore, who "opened up Japan." His name will be associated, as long as the story of the two nations is told, with the event. But it was Aulick's idea, not Perry's; and it all hung upon the luck which those Japanese fishermen, waifs upon a boundless ocean, had in being picked up by a generous Yankee skipper, and in finding their way to so wholehearted and so hospitable a city toward "Mongolian" wanderers as San Francisco was--then! If this incident had not suggested and been followed by the Aulick-Perry expedition, what then? Russian authorities have claimed that Russia was preparing a similar expedition at the time when Secretary Webster--"too zealous," according to their view--sent the United States ships on their way. There is good reason to believe that the Russian government would have been slow in making such an infinitely clever move as the Perry expedition constituted. Yet if the United States had not taken the step, Russia would have stood next in the line of logical inheritance to the idea. And if Japan had been opened under Russian auspices, its doors, instead of standing open toward the East, and consequently toward _our_ West, would have opened toward the Asiatic continental West, which would have meant toward St. Petersburg. If the Japanese had, under Russian initiative, adopted the material adjuncts of western civilization, as they finally did under ours, that civilization would have taken on a distinctly Muscovite color. The Japanese would never, indeed, have been able, under such auspices, to organize an effective resistance to Russian arms, for long before they had acquired the requisite training they must have been held firmly in the grip of the Russian military system. That is to say, Japan would have been, step by step, annexed to the Russian empire. The Russo-Japanese war would never have been, since there would have been neither hope nor occasion for it. Most of the rich fruits of Japanese art and industry would have drifted toward Russia. The Russian empire would have been enormously enriched by the Japanese trade, and the importance of that empire immensely magnified in the history of our epoch. A reflex orientalizing influence would have rolled over Russia itself, and the course of Russian internal development altered in a degree now almost incalculable.