Coming nearer the present and touching upon what may be the last phase, three unimpeachable author!- ties have concurred on this. spinal defect. The veteran China authority, Mr. J. 0. P. Bland, writing again after long silence, in the Asia maga-me for, July 1998, under the tit The Old Weaknesses of Chin," quotes the fierce denunciations of Mr, Wang Ching-wel and Gen. Chang Fa-kwei Manifesto of 1929; Dr, Lin Yutang's scathing strictures on "hinese officialdom: and the glaring highlights and exhortations of the "Open Letter to the Chinese People" by Pearl Buck, Turning fo the strengths of Japan, it must not be lost to sight that this peorfe rose by sheer virtue (which took generations to evolve) from 9 mere Fock-isolated nothingness {0 world Power in the space of living] memory.
This moral foree—odd as the words may sound to the ear in view of the Japanese Army's ghastly excesses at, Nanking—stands four-square in all ts power opposed to the Chinese decadence. Even assuming the turning point for Japan's moral stamina has set in and that of China's regeneration has come, it must needs be age-long before such a reversal can triumph. Thus a military victory by Japan may not, to all practical purposes, be followed by her peaceful defeat, which i€ it does happen may take @ century or so to come about. And what are we to say, after milltary Japan has achieved its objective China, and Japan is faced with certain imperious necessities, as to how all the leaders of Japan—military and elvil—are going to shape the nation's policies?
It seems overwhelmingly to be the case that its development must make of Japan an enlightened collaborator with the great people of this land, and with those enormously wealthy Mberty-loving democratic Powers, The safest guide as to the probable course of the future is to be found
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.