mply to keep China for the
Chinese. She is not, as so many persons imagined and still imagine
would be the case, going to be led as a powerful ox with a Japanese
driver. Chinese students are in hundreds in Japan, learning from that
country all that the Japanese have acquired from Europe. Young, alert,
capable men I found them without exception, sucking the brains of all
that is best in Japan precisely as the Japanese have sucked the brains
of all that is best in Europe for their own objects and to their own
advantage. The immediate danger in China seems, so far as I can judge,
to be that the anti-foreign feeling, which is undoubtedly intense
especially in the south of the Empire, may come to a head any day and
prematurely explode. The nincompoops and quidnuncs and newspaper men
ravenous for copy who prate about a "yellow peril" may, in this latter
fact, find some slight excuse for their blatant lucubrations. There is
no real "yellow peril." Poor old China, which has been so long
slumbering, is just rousing herself and making arrangements for
defence against the "white peril," materialistic civilisation, and
misrepresented Christianity.

The only "yellow peril" that I have been able to diagnose is the peril
to the trade of Europe and the United States of America with China--a
peril that appears to me to be imminent. That Japan intends to capture
a large, indeed the largest, proportion of that trade I am firmly
convinced. That she will succeed in effecting her object I have not
the slightest doubt. At the present moment only about 5 per cent. of
the imports into China are from Japan, the remainder being either from
India, Europe, or America. Situated in close contiguity to China,
having assimilated everything of importance not only in regard to the
employment but the manufacture of machinery from Europe and the United
States, possessing an industrious and intelligent population, Japan is
quite obviously in a magnificent position to supply China, and supply
her on much better terms, with the greater number of those commodities
which China now has to import either from Europe or America. Japan, as
I have said, intends to lay herself out to capture the major portion
of this trade; she is quite justified in doing so, and there is every
reason to suppose that she will attain her object.

That the Chinese students who have come to Japan and are flocking
there month by month in increasing numbers, with a thirst for
knowledge a