"How well have done our people! How well have our statesmen led them! No mistakes! There must be none now. In 1895 we conquered China--Russia, Germany, and France stole from us the booty. How has our strength grown since then--and still it grows! In ten years we punished and retook our own from Russia; in twenty years we squared and retook from Germany; with France there is no need for haste. She has already realized why we withheld the troops which alone might have driven the invader from her soil! Her fingers are clutching more tightly around her Oriental booty; yet she knows it is ours for the taking. But there is no need of haste: the world condemns the paltry thief; only the glorious conqueror wins the plaudits and approval of mankind. "We are now well astride of our steed, China; but the steed has long roamed wild and is run down: it needs grooming, more grain, more training. Further, our saddle and bridle are as yet mere makeshifts: would steed and trappings stand the strain of war? And what would that strain be? "As for America--that fatuous booby with much money and much sentiment, but no cohesion, no brains of government; stood she alone we should not need our China steed. Well did my friend speak the other day when he called her people a race of thieves with the hearts of rabbits. America, to any warrior race, is not as a foe, but as an immense melon, ripe for the cutting. But there are other warrior races--England, Germany--would they look on and let us slice and eat our fill? Would they? "But, using China as our steed, should our first goal be the land? India? Or the Pacific, the sea that must be our very own, even as the Atlantic is now England's? The land is tempting and easy, but withal dangerous. Did we begin there, the coarse white races would too soon awaken, and combine, and forever immure us within our long since grown intolerable bounds. It must, therefore, be the sea; but the sea means the Western Americas and all the islands between; and with those must soon come Australia, India. And then the battling for the balance of world-power, for the rest of North America. Once that is ours, we own and control the whole--a dominion worthy of our race! "North America alone will support a billion people; that billion shall be Japanese with their slaves. Not arid Asia, nor worn-out Europe (which, with its peculiar and quaint relics and customs should in the interests of history and culture, be in any case preserved), nor yet tropical Africa, is fit for our people. But North America, that continent so succulently green, fresh, and unsullied--except for the few chattering, mongrel Yankees--should have been ours by right of discovery: it shall be ours by the higher, nobler right of conquest."[33]