Before we can judge these we must consider the nature of the field in which they seem to clash most with American ideas and with American and European interests, namely, China and Eastern Asia generally. In my next paper I will ask, “What is China?” and consider the nature of the needs and claims of Japan in regard to China and the prohibitions and the renunciations the Western powers want to impose upon her. For it is on account of these restrictions and prohibitions that Japan has been building her battleships. Her fighting fleet is to secure her a free hand in China and Siberia; it can have no other purpose. And I shall take up the question whether the prohibitions and renunciations we want to force upon Japan are not prohibitions and restrictions that we are bound in fairness to impose equally upon all powers concerned with China and the Far East. If the other powers are not prepared for extreme general retractions and renunciation in China; if they want to bar out Japan from aggressive practices and exclusive advantages that other powers retain; if we cling to any sort of racial distinction in these matters, then I shall submit, we are asking impossible things from Japan and we are forcing her toward what must must be indeed a very desperate gamble for her, a refusal to enter into this proposed disarmament agreement—and that means war. VIII CHINA IN THE BACKGROUND Washington, Nov. 16. The Chinese propaganda in America and Western Europe seems on the whole to be conducted more efficiently than the Japanese. And the Chinese student, it seems to me, gets into closer touch with the educated American and European because his is a democratic and not an aristocratic habit of mind. He has an intensely Western sense of public opinion. The masses of China may be destitute, ignorant and disordered, but in their mental habits they are modern and not mediæval, in the same sense that the Japanese are mediæval and not modern. The Chinese seem to “get on” with their Western social equivalents better than any of the Asiatic people. And increasing multitudes of Chinese are learning English today; it is the second language in China. Now, if Japan is the figure in the limelight at Washington today, China is the giant in the background and scene of the present Pacific drama. We have had so much in the papers lately about these two countries, we have been treated to such a feast of particulars about them, that most of us have long since forgotten very thoroughly the broad facts of the case, and it will be refreshing to recall them here and now.