us only in things material. Things spiritual cannot
be imitated; they must be felt and lived, woven into the very fabric of
life, and here the Japanese fails.

It required no revolution of his nature to learn to calculate the range
and fire a field gun or to march the goose-step. It was a mere matter of
training. Our material achievement is the product of our intellect. It
is knowledge, and knowledge, like coin, is interchangeable. It is not
wrapped up in the heredity of the new-born child, but is something to be
acquired afterward. Not so with our soul stuff, which is the product of
an evolution which goes back to the raw beginnings of the race. Our soul
stuff is not a coin to be pocketed by the first chance comer. The
Japanese cannot pocket it any more than he can thrill to short Saxon
words or we can thrill to Chinese hieroglyphics. The leopard cannot
change its spots, nor can the Japanese, nor can we. We are thumbed by
the ages into what we are, and by no conscious inward effort can we in a
day rethumb ourselves. Nor can the Japanese in a day, or a generation,
rethumb himself in our image.

Back of our own great race adventure, back of our robberies by sea and
land, our lusts and violences and all the evil things we have done, there
is a certain integrity, a sternness of conscience, a melancholy
responsibility of life, a sympathy and comradeship and warm human feel,
which is ours, indubitably ours, and which we cannot teach to the
Oriental as we would teach logarithms or the trajectory of projectiles.
That we have groped for the way of right conduct and agonized over the
soul betokens our spiritual endowment. Though we have strayed often and
far from righteousness, the voices of the seers have always been raised,
and we have harked back to the bidding of conscience. The colossal fact
of our history is that we have made the religion of Jesus Christ our
religion. No matter how dark in error and deed, ours has been a history
of spiritual struggle and endeavour. We are pre-eminently a religious
race, which is another way of saying that we are a right-seeking race.

"What do you think of the Japanese?" was asked an American woman after
she had lived some time in Japan. "It seems to me that they have no
soul," was her answer.

This must not be taken to mean that the Japanese is without soul. But it
serves to illustrate the enormous difference between their souls and this
woman's soul. There was no fee