that Commodore Perry was the man who awoke Japan and made it possible for her to enter the family of modern nations. That service to Japan, the premier points out in a newspaper article, was not performed by Commodore Perry. It was the work, he argues, of Nikolai Lezanoff, who headed an imperial mission to Japan at the command of Czar Alexander I. fifty years before Perry was heard from. The purpose of this mission, relates Count Okuma, was to open up Japan to the rest of the world, and the task was successfully accomplished.

Count Okuma does not explain how it happened that, fifty years after the opening of Japan by Lezanoff, Perry found it tightly closed. He does, however, indicate with unmistakable candor the new direction in which the wind from Tokio has set in. His little essay on history is entitled to the serious attention of Congress and of the American people.

Perry's services to Japan, and Japan's warm sense of gratitude to America for dispatching his naval expedition to awaken the Japanese from their sleep of centuries, have been regarded hitherto as the basis of an undying friendship between the United States and Japan. That friendship was the magic formula which was expected to solve in an amicable way any trouble that might arise between the two countries. In the gravest phases of the California controversy, and the controversy arising out of the exclusion of Japanese coolies, we assured from Tokio that Japan could never raise a hand against the nation that let the current of modern life into the veins of Nippon. Now that formula is swept

away by a denial of the achievement upon which it was based. And this denial is not made by some irresponsible professor, but by the premier of Japan, who presumably is too busy and too high-placed a personage to dabble in merely academic matters.

Japan is in contact with the white man's world at only two points— Russia and America. Russia, in the light of the treaty of alliance recently signed with Japan, is excluded from the scope of possible Japanese aggression by a community of interests. But the white man's world, flinging itself across the Atlantic, has crossed the Pacific and has come in touch with Japan in a sphere which by Japan's declaration is exclusively Asiaticthat is to say, Japanese. And this white man's country is the only remaining Caucasion-inhabited land in which there is plenty of elbow room and untold wealth still awaiting development. Japan is swarming with one of the most densely congested populations in the world and a high birth rate is constantly adding to the congestion. The eastern side of the Asiatic continent, already overcrowded, is not attracting Japanese immigration. America remains the land of heart's desire for the Japanese.

In conjunction with these facts it is interesting to note that Japan's latest naval programme provides for the construction of eight superdreadnoughts and six battle cruisers. The National Security League, in a communication to the House naval committee, calls attention to this ambitious programme of naval expansion as a matter of vital concern to Congress.

Will Congress take into considera

tion the manifest signs of the time, or shall we drift with closed eyes into a situation which may bring a national disaster?

Against whom is Japan undertaking these gigantic naval preparations? That is a question which Congress and the American people should keep clearly in mind.-Aug. 10, 1916.

KUMAGAE

The victory of the Japanese, Kumagae, over our national champion, Johnston, of California, in the Newport invitation tournament, was an event that should start us thinking.

It may be that in the national championship at Newport some one may be found to defeat the Jap. Otherwise the championship of this country, and so of the world, will go to Japan. If Kumagae can win, all honor and success to him.

A few superficial people may still think that in Japan we do not have to deal with a really first-class people. The Japanese are interesting but backward, they say, and the individual American can lick three Japs.

Some of the superficial superior ones can understand tennis when they know nothing of world politics. Let them ponder on Kumagae. He has played a western game a few years in Japan with no players of class to practice with. He comes to America and blooms into the first candidate for the national championship.

Let these superior Americans consider how well we should do against the Japanese at their game, war. They are keen recipients of what

the West has to teach. Kumagae learned, in absentia, the tennis lessons of the western world. He is passing a good examination. He and his friends have also learned what England knew of naval warfare, what Germany knew of land fighting. Then they add something Japanese to what the West taught them. So with Kumagae. He has an uncanny twist and drop in his drives which can hardly be volleyed.

So in trade. Somehow the British and American trade development in the far East ceased, replaced by Japan, who now progresses also in Russia and South America. They took our machines. They added something else of their own.

It is quite an able little nation, worthy of our thoughtful, thoughtful consideration.-Aug. 23, 1916.

SWORDMAKER TO THE

ALLIES

According to a communication received from Tokio, 5,000 Japanese swords have been ordered for the use of officers in the allied army.-Washington Star

What folly it is for America, by denying equality to the Japanese, to run the risk of war with the swordmaker to the officers of the allies-Aug. 29, 1916.

A NEGLECTED OPPORTUNITY

To meet her urgent financial needs China is to borrow $30,000,000 or more from Japan. It was the hope and expectation of China to get this money from the United States, in whom she has confidence, but, unable to do so, she must in her extremity, borrow from the Japs whom she fears.

It is to the commercial good and the political benefit of the United States that the door of China be kept open. It will not be kept open to the rest of the world by Japan.

Commerce follows money. Japan is shrewd in buttressing her political and her military steps toward China with her financial power.

It is not to our credit that we, the richest people of the earth, should at the time of our greatest prosperity, neglect this great field for our product by refusing to lend to a nation in temporary monetary distress a paltry $30,000,000.

Japan, more far sighted, but immeasurably poorer, will pour out

many times $30,000,000 if necessary to gain China's trade.

When will our financiers realize that they are but the trustees of our funds? When will they appreciate the duty they owe to all the people; to open new and broader markets for the output of the factories of the middle West, for the goods that come from the cotton mills of New England and the Carolinas; to give cargo to American ships, put money in the pay envelope of the American workman and strengthen and better not only America but the nations that America serves? When will they put a bit of patriotism into financial leadership?-Sept. 4, 1916.

OUR TEXTILE EXPORTS

It is not to the credit of the American cotton manufacturer that in a time of the greatest demand in the history of the textile industry our exports amount only to a trifle more than 5 per cent. of production.

The export business of the steel industry, direct and indirect, is estimated by Judge Gary at 25 per cent. The export business of the automobile industry is immense. So it is with almost every other important department of production. Only the textile industry lags.

Some American cotton mills have declined foreign orders. They are doing so well with domestic business that they are perfectly content.

That is the trouble with the American cotton manufacturer. He considers the export business as a crutch-something to be used when home business is bad, but to cast aside when home trade is good. Home trade is excellent now. So he cares little about foreign orders.

South America is ready to buy American cotton goods. So is Central America. Italy has tried to place orders. There is a large trade. to be had in Africa and elsewhere. Many of the mills of Belgium, Germany and Austria are idle. So are tens of thousands of the spindles of France and Russia.

Opportunity such as America never had before presents itself, but is neglected.

The cotton goods of the United

States never will be marketed throughout the world until the American textile industry is managed with enterprise, vision and real appreciation of the value of an export trade.-Jan. 15, 1916.

PAN-AMERICAN UNDER-
STANDING NEARER

Harvard University has done a service of great importance to the cause of pan-American unity by the establishment of a chair of LatinAmerican history and economics. The success of this step toward a better understanding of the prosperous and growing peoples south of the Rio Grande is assured by the selection of one of the most distinguished scholars and public men of South America for the newly created professorship. He is Dr. Ernesto Quesada, Attorney-General of the Argentine Republic, Professor of Sociology at the University of Buenos Ayres and Professor of Political Economy at the University of La Plata.

Dr. Quesada is a thorough believer in the doctrine that the essential interests of the Latin-American republics are identical with those of the United States. As chief of the Argentinian delegation to the PanAmerican Scientific Congress recently held in Washington, he gave powerful advocacy to the movement for united action by all the states

of the two Americas for the promotion of their common interests, commercial, industrial, political and intellectual.

A thinker of large vision and a singular clarity of analysis, Dr. Quesada will be able, perhaps better than anybody else on the two continents, to impress upon the minds of American students the fallacy of the attitude which we have heretofore maintained in our relations with the Latin-American states. This fallacy is best illustrated by the general assumption held by the man in the street that the other Americaș are a lot of turbulent oligarchies, masquerading under the name of republics, whose only hope of salvation lies in the adoption of our customs, our social organization and our point of view.

A man of impressive dignity and great charm of manner, he is qualified, perhaps better than any other man on the two continents, to substitute for this arrogant delusion the truth that at least some of the Latin republics have attained to as high a grade of civilization as our own, that their background of achievement is in no way less worthy than our own, that if we desire to cultivate enduring relations with our neighbors to the south we must set about doing it on a basis of equality instead of the present ground of tolerant superiority-the sort of superiority an adult adopts in dealing with a child.

Finally, this eminent Latin-American will be able to convey to the North American mind the fact that, because of this unwarranted assumption of superiority, the United States has largely alienated the sympathies of young and energetic peoples who would gladly have regarded this republic as an elder sis

ter and a model. And he will be able to show us that by our lack of comprehension we have missed a great opportunity, perhaps never again to be presented in the same degree, to build up profitable business relations with countries of unlimited possibilities of development.

If Dr. Quesada succeeds in performing these services to the cause of pan-Americanism, he will earn the gratitude of the two Americas.Nov. 7, 1915.

WANTED, A STATESMAN IN FINANCE

Through lack of a man of great financial and commercial vision, America is in danger of losing the greatest opportunity ever presented to a nation. In 1910, the latest year for which statistics are obtainable, the wealth of the United States was $187,000,000,000; Great Britain, $85,000,000,000; Germany, $80,000,000,000; France, $50,000,000,000; Russia, $40,000,000,000; Austria-Hungary, $25,000,000,000; Italy, $20,000,000,000; India, $15,000,000,000, and that of all other countries combined less than $100,000,000,000. In material strength, therefore, the United States had approximately one-third of the total of the world.

The position of America was peculiar. With all its wealth and power its part in international commerce was small. A large proportion of its raw products, like cotton and copper, went out of the country, carried in foreign ships to foreign lands to be manufactured into finished goods and then sold the world over and, in not a few instances, sold to America itself. Fa