Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/25

 difference between the two countries. China stands, in the Far East, an imposing figure with her gigantic expanse of territory, her immense population, and her vast wealth of undeveloped resources. Such elements seem capable of being moulded into a world-moving force, and their potentialities have even appalled some leaders of European thought. But if history teaches anything it teaches that there is only one grand climacteric in the career of a nation. Beyond the summit descent is inevitable. The continuity of the downward grade is never broken by a second eminence. As it fares with a man or with a tree, so it fares with a nation's growth or decay. China long ago reached the zenith of her greatness, and has been sinking steadily to lower levels ever since. She was never an isolated State, husbanding her resources in seclusion and waiting to be galvanised into new life by contact with rival countries. Her very name, the "Middle Kingdom," indicates the relation in which she stood to the rest of the world. Whatever other States had to give, she received as a tribute to her own ineffable superiority, not as an incentive to emulation and exertion. That frame of mind became at last an instinct. It destroyed her appetite for assimilation and condemned her to succumb to any civilisation she could not despise. Japan's case has been dissimilar from point to point. Her whole career has been a continuous effort of assimilation; her invariable attitude, that of