In the days of imperialistic competition they stiffened to a conscientious selfishness and a splendid fighting energy. Now that a new spirit of discussion, compromise and the desire for brotherhood spreads about the world, they catch the new note and they sound it with obvious sincerity and good will. No people has been under such keen and suspicious observation here as the Japanese. The idea of them as of a people insanely patriotic, patriotically subtle and treacherous, mysterious and mentally inaccessible has been largely dispelled. I myself have tried that view over in my mind and dismissed it, and multitudes of the commonplace men have gone through the same experience here. Our Western world, I am convinced, can work with the Japanese and understand and trust them. It will be for other and abler pens to record the detailed working out of the results of this great conference, this new experiment in human reasonableness, as far as it affects Shantung and Yap and Hongkong and Port Arthur and so forth. My time in Washington is drawing to an end, and I will confine myself now rather to that broader and vaguer question in which I am more interested—the question of what lies behind and beyond this most successful and hopeful beginning in open international co-operation. Great and important as the conference is, the growth of a real and understandable project for the steady, systematic development of an effective international world peace, which has been going on in men’s minds here and in the world generally in the last two months is a much greater thing. It is a quite amazing mental growth; something very quiet and simple and yet astonishing, like a clear crystallization out of a turbid solution. Before the conference gathered, civilized people throughout the world were, I think, quite confused about how the peace of the world could ever be organized and rather hopeless about its being done. Now I think there is a widespread and spreading unanimity that there is a way, a practicable way and a hopeful way, by successive conferences, by widening peace agreements, by the establishment of permanent joint commissions, by systematic education and the sedulous cultivation of confidence, along which humanity may struggle and will struggle out of its present miseries and dangers toward the dawn of a new life.