DANGER IN THE BROWN MEN.
Competition of an Astute and Highly Developed Race.

The danger to Western civilization, from the rapid rise of the Japanese as a military power is no new discovery of the "Chronicle" or of any American. The danger was first scented by those peoples who have far more to lose than the Americans in established trade and influence in the Far East. From time to time the more thoughtful British periodicals devote much space to the consideration of the subject, and as long ago as February 2, 1896, the "Chronicle" quoted freely from the writings of British observers as evidence of the insecure feeling among the manufacturers of the British islands. In the article referred to the "Chronicle" itself paid a high tribute to the qualities of the Japanese people, and plainly showed that in our dealings with Japan we must drop at once and forever all notions that we are dealing with a "semi-civilized" or "inferior" race, and recognize the unquestionable fact that the Japanese are a vigorous and highly developed people, who, after ages of exclusion, have suddenly projected themselves into the theater of the world, under the greatest possible advantages. While Japan was living wholly within herself, the nations of Europe and America, at enormous cost, have developed the arts of war and peace to a point inconceivable to those of even a century ago, and when Japan emerged from her seclusion she was able to at once come into possession of all that Western science can teach without bearing any portion of the travail and waste of their development. Said the "Chronicle" more than nine years ago:

It would be a gross blunder to class a people as barbarous who had reached such an artistic and industrial development as the Japanese. It is unwise to underrate the qualities of a competitor. * * The Western invader did not find a semi-civilized people in Japan, he merely found a civilization differing from his own, and, with the customary contemptuousness of a conqueror, he underrated it.

That civilization will always be different from that of the West, because it is founded on fundamental differences in racial character. But is must be recognized as a good civilization backed up by great physical power and the ability to use it.

It is in view of all these considerations that the "Chronicle" insists that we take up the matter of the separation of the races for the good of both. We need not propose the exclusion of Japanese as barbarians, or as inferior to ourselves. We must demand it because we are determined to maintain our own civilization unimpaired, while perfectly willing that the Japanese should do the same, but at the same time clearly seeing that the two forms of civilization cannot thrive side by side on the same soil or even exist without producing armed conflict.