Page:Japan - A Lecture.djvu/22

20 Western civilisation prevails, the whole people are being taught from their boyhood, by all kinds of means, to foster ambitions in their minds, which are the greatest menace to their neighbours and to nations other than their own. This is poisoning the very fountainhead of humanity. It is discrediting the ideals, which were born of the lives of men, who were our greatest and best. It is holding up selfishness as the one universal religion for all nations of the world. We can take anything else from the hands of science but not this elixir of moral death. Never think for a moment that the hurts you inflict upon other races will not infect you, and the enmities you sow around your homes will be a wall of protection for you for all time to come. To imbue the minds of a whole people with an abnormal vanity of its own superiority, to teach it to take pride in its moral callousness and ill-begotten wealth, to perpetrate the humiliation of defeated nations by exhibiting trophies won from war and using these in schools in order to breed in children's minds contempt for others is imitating the West where she has a festering sore, whose swelling is a swelling of disease eating into its vitality.

Our food crops, which are necessary for our sustenance, are products of centuries of selection and care. But the vegetation, which we have not to transform into our lives, does not require the patient thoughts of generations. It is not easy to get rid