Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/345

 THE JAPANESE AS PEERS OF WESTERN PEOPLES 329

become a plain necessity, except where population is absorbed by the recent extraordinary growth in manufactures and com- merce. Japanese show equal skill with French and Italians in the culture, reeling, and spinning of silk; and this article forms the chief item of export. They grow tea, mine coal and copper, and are every year making an increased number of articles in demand by the home and foreign markets, as well as these are made anywhere. Their skill and industry quail at nothing that other peoples can do; and when the raw material fails at home as with cotton, iron, sugar, and kerosene it is imported from abroad. Under such conditions, Japanese commerce grew from 13 million dollars in 1869 to 303 millions in 1903, of which exports furnished 145 millions and imports 158 an unprece- dented increase in the world's history, of course! Growth in the merchant marine has reached from a mere coasting trade with junks to a place fifth in the list of nations! As an example of organization, Japanese may offer their postal system, now the cheapest and perhaps the best in the world, besides an excellent system of postal savings-banks. Letters are carried for one cent, and postal cards for half a cent each.

If the Baconian maxim, that the start is all, be correct, then Europe is debtor for its mathematics and science to the marvelous Greeks, whom Francis Galton credits with the highest genius of any people that have yet lived. This science other Indo-Keltic peoples in Europe and America have hitherto enjoyed the sole credit of deepening and extending; but within a few decades the Mongolian Japanese have shown such brilliant results in the same direction that here, too, they must now be included in " the fore- most files of time." The Murata rifle, with which the Japanese army is so well equipped, is the invention of a Japanese, and was further improved by Colonel Arisaka; while the smokeless pow- der used was invented by Mr. Shimose. The German bacteri- ologist, Dr. Behring, must freely share his laurels with his collaborator, the Japanese Dr. Kitasato, for the discovery of diphtheritic antitoxin ; while the distinction of isolating the active principle of the suprarenal glands called adrenalin, now the most powerful astringent and hemostatic known, fell to Dr. Takamine,