A few days later he called again on the Viscount. He should have liked to have arranged it again so he would see the girl alone; still, it was time to get to work, to try somehow to establish a beginning point whence he might evolve his information. The beginning of the interview moved smoothly as he had planned, almost too smoothly. They arrived at the crucial point, the Bywater article, so easily that Kent had an uneasy sense that this smoothness, this facility, was deceptive, that the Viscount by some trick of intuition knew what he was after and was leading him on. The feeling disturbed him; he had to strive to overcome a sense of diffidence, a suspicion that he was but being played with by this uncannily clever diplomat, the master mind of the Japanese Empire, who had for decades gained experience at this game in bouts with the best trained brains of Europe and America.
"To come to the point, Mr. Kent, the fact is that it is believed, or at least suspected, that Japan, while living up to the letter of the Washington Conference agreement, is, in fact, violating the spirit thereof; that while she is keeping her battle fleet strictly within the ratio of six to America's and England's ten, as she agreed to do, she is trying to make up for the difference in ratio by building up a great fleet of powerful submarines. I am glad that we may take up this matter together, for it is important that this misunderstanding be set right. The fact is, as naval statistics which have already been made public will show you, that we are merely trying to make our auxiliary fleet forces catch up to the proper proportion they should bear to the battle fleet. As you know, Japan is a poor country. In the past the naval authorities decided to build a great fleet of vessels of the first class, but to do so they had to give up building the number of auxiliary craft which is generally considered by the naval experts of all countries to be the minimum necessary to keep up the proportion between battleships and auxiliaries. In other words, as we did not have enough money to have both first-class ships and auxiliaries, we decided to build the big ships, even though we knew that we should be short of the smaller ones. Now that the Conference has made it unnecessary to spend the great sums set aside for battleship construction, we are using the chance to build smaller craft to the number necessary to make proper proportion. That's the reason you hear that we are building some submarines; but remember there's nothing sinister about that. We are merely rounding out our construction program along the lines recognized as being proper by all naval authorities. Of course, the mere fact that we are building is being made use of by the anti-Japanese propagandists, who seize anything whatever to make out a case against Japan. It's partly because Japan's liberal diplomacy of recent years had cut very short the crop of material that may be used as propaganda against us. We have always kept our word in both letter and spirit. We gave the Chinese liberal terms in the Shantung settlement, and we have withdrawn our troops from Shantung. We were liberal in respect to Yap. We have withdrawn our troops from Siberia. We showed the world at the Washington Conference that we have no militaristic ambitions. Our action in all these cases has deprived the anti-Japanese propagandists of their old weapons, so now they must invent stuff for calumny. All we want is fair play. I know that you, Mr. Kent, are as interested as I am in maintaining the friendly spirit now existing between America and Japan; that you are glad to help combat the mischief-makers. Of course, you know that I must never be quoted--but I give you my word that there is not the slightest basis in fact for the belief that Japan is violating either the letter or the spirit of the Washington agreement, and the talk about her building an unduly large submarine fleet is pure buncombe."