dress,
which they do not understand, and which conceals their bodies, they are
apt to look mean and vulgar. Similarly, in European dress, they lose
their own perfect manners and mis-acquire the worst of the West. So that
there may be some excuse for feeling "repugnance" to the Japanese
abroad, though, of course, it is merely absurd and barbarous to base
upon such superficial distaste a policy of persecution and insult.

If we turn from the body to the mind and the spirit, the Japanese show
themselves in no respect inferior, and in some important respects
superior, to the Americans. New though they are to the whole mental
attitude which underlies science and its applications, they have
already, in half a century, produced physicians, surgeons, pathologists,
engineers who can hold their own with the best of Europe and America.
All that the West can do in this, its own special sphere, the Japanese,
late-comers though they be, are showing that they can do too. In
particular, to apply the only test which the Western nations seem really
to accept, they can build ships, train men, organise a campaign, and
beat a great Western Power at the West's own game of slaughter. But all
this, of science and armaments, big though it bulks in our imagination,
is secondary and subordinate in a true estimate of civilisation. The
great claim the Japanese may make, as I began by saying, is that they
have known how to live; and they have proved that by the only test--by
the way they have reflected life.

Japanese literature and art may not be as great as that of Europe; but
it exists, whereas that of America and all the new countries is yet to
seek. While Europe was still plunged in the darkest of the dark ages,
Japanese poets were already producing songs in exquisite response to the
beauty of nature, the passion and pathos of human life. From the seventh
century on, their painting and their sculpture was reflecting in tender
and gracious forms the mysteries of their faith. Their literature and
their art changed its content and its form with the centuries, but it
continued without a break, in a stream of genuine inspiration, down to
the time when the West forced open the doors of Japan to the world. From
that moment, under the new influences, it has sickened and declined. But
what a record! And a record that is also an incontrovertible proof that
the Japanese belong to the civilised nations--the nations that can live
and express life.

But