Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/86

 Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905, she viewed with real horror Westernism sweeping in on China like a torrent and threatening entirely to capture it under the name of Democracy. For the isolation which existed under the Tokugawa Shogunate for two and half centuries still lives spiritually in Japan: Japanese national life remains a curious compound of adjustments and half-tones, a rather delicate thing that like a hothouse plant might easily be blasted if left exposed to the cold winds of Reason. To preserve in the second decennium of the twentieth century not only a belief in the divine right of kings, but to propagate officially in every school, in every college, and in every university of the land the cult of the actual divinity of the Emperor, emphatically necessitates a juggling with the problems of the other world of an almost fantastic nature. In the writer's belief the secret of Japanese diplomacy may be traced to this unreal foundation of government, which is further complicated by the haunting conviction that the Western races are really stronger, more virile, and more efficient than the races of the East and must infallibly dominate them whenever it comes to an open trial of strength. And if we take this hypothesis as a starting-point obscurity vanishes.