sing before her
national characteristics differ from what they are now; but of Japan it
is different, for, having made up their minds to remodel the empire, the
sons of Nippon are not doing things by halves, and the old is being
supplanted by the new with amazing rapidity.

Possibly it is a misfortune to find oneself incapable of preparing a
volume of travel without inflicting a sermon upon kindly disposed
persons, but a book of journeyings loaded with gentle preachment must at
least be a novelty. Travel books imparting no patriotic lesson may well
be left to authors and readers of older and self-sufficient nations. A
work appealing on common lines to a New World audience would be worse
than banal, and a conscientious American writer is compelled to describe
not alone what he saw, but in clarion notes tell of some things he
failed of seeing for our country, emerging but now from the formative
period, and destined to permanently lead the universe in material
affairs, is entitled to be better known in the East by its manufactures.

Every piece of money expended in travel is but the concrete form of
somebody's toil, or the equivalent of a marketed product: and
consequently it is almost unnecessary to remind that industry and thrift
must precede expenditure, or to assert that toil and travel bear
inseparable relationship. What the American, zigzagging up and down and
across that boundless region spoken of as East of Suez, fails to see is
the product of Uncle Sam's mills, workshops, mines and farms. From the
moment he passes the Suez Canal to his arrival at Hong Kong or Yokohama,
the Stars and Stripes are discovered in no harbor nor upon any sea; and
maybe he sees the emblem of the great republic not once in the transit
of the Pacific. And the products of our marvelous country are met but
seldom, if at all, where the American wanders in the East. He is
rewarded by finding that the Light of Asia is American petroleum, but
that is about the only Western commodity he is sure of encountering in
months of travel.

This state of things is grievously wrong, for it should be as easy for
us to secure trade in the Orient as for any European nation, and
assuredly easier than for Germany. We have had such years of material
prosperity and progress as were never known in the history of any
people, it is true; but every cycle of prosperity has been succeeded by
lean years, and ever will be. When the inevitable over-production and
lessen