"Let me say here that . . . is mistaken in the {150} statement that the United States' within living memory waged the greatest civil war of modern times in order to establish the claim of American negroes to equal right of citizenship with the white population.' With the statement falls necessarily his inference from it, that 'a colour bar cannot be logically pleaded as prohibitive.' The United States did not wage the War of Secession even for the abolition of slavery, still less for equal rights of citizenship. Goldwin Smith, as a contemporary, held against us that the war, not being for abolition, was one of conquest. Lincoln said distinctly:--'I will restore the union with slavery or without slavery, as best can be.' Myself a contemporary and partaker, I can affirm this as a general tone, though there was a strong minority of abolition sentiment. The abolition proclamation came 18 months after the war began, and purely as a measure of policy. The full rights of citizenship came after the war ended, as a party political measure, though doubtless with this mingled much humanitarian feeling. Concerning this legislation a very acute American thinker, himself in the war, said to me within the past two years, 'The great mistake of the men of that day was the unconscious assumption that the negro was a white man, with the accident of a black skin.' That is, the question was not one of colour, but of assimilation as involved in race character. Now, while recognizing what I clearly see to be the great superiority of the Japanese, as of the white over the negro, it appears to me reasonable that a great number of my fellow-citizens, knowing the problem we have in the coloured race among us, should dread the introduction {151} of what they believe will constitute another race problem; and one much more difficult, because the virile qualities of the Japanese will still more successfully withstand assimilation, constituting a homogeneous foreign mass, naturally acting together irrespective of the national welfare, and so will be a perennial cause of friction with Japan, even more dangerous than at present. . . . [Here follows a personal appreciation of the Japanese as Admiral Mahan had known them for forty years, and to which most thoughtful Pan-Angles would gladly subscribe. He then concludes:] ". . . Despite gigantic success up to the present in assimilative processes--due to English institutions inherited and Americanized, and to the prevalence among the children of our community of the common English tongue over all other idioms--America doubts her power to digest and assimilate the strong national and racial characteristics which distinguish the Japanese, which are the secret of much of their success, and which, if I am not mistaken, would constitute them continually a solid homogeneous body, essentially and unchangingly foreign."