Russia and China may be the active foes of our children. We can bequeath them only such aid in their struggle as our foresight dictates. Meanwhile we have problems of our own demanding more immediate solution.
Russia and China are the rivals of to-morrow.
Japan and Germany are the rivals of to-day.
To Japan the Pan-Angles should doff their hats as to their peers. Radically different, they are not our inferiors. Japan has forged ahead materially at a rate that Pan-Angles have never in their history approached. In 1853, when the American Pan-Angle Admiral Perry forced foreign commerce on Japan, the land was a feudal area given over to devastating civil wars. The privileges that the white races after 1853 exacted have been gradually and entirely taken back. Japan now stands as a world power. Its people are increasing rapidly. It builds its own ships. The three fastest merchant steamers on the Pacific to-day are Japanese.[142-1] No one forgets, and it is hoped that no Pan-Angle underestimates, the medical ability and the discipline that backed the bravery and the patriotic spirit of the Japanese in their life-and-death struggle against Russia. The Japanese have taken Formosa and Korea from China, and have held the last-named acquisition against Russia, taking also from Russia the southern half of Sakhalin. As Scotland, Wales, and England have been called Great Britain, so the Japanese have called their home group "Dai Nippon," Great Japan.
Japan, the Dai Nippon group of islands, has a { 143} geographical area of about 150,000 square miles, or three-quarters the size of Germany, or slightly greater than the area of the British Isles. Its population of forty-nine millions is three-quarters that of Germany, or about one-ninth more than that of the British Isles, or five-sixths that of the whites of the Britannic nations, or over one-third the white population of the Pan-Angle world. Although Formosa and Korea, and possible portions of Manchuria, are to be considered to-day as dependencies of Japan, the fact remains that Great Japan as a power, despite slight differences of dialect, contains a homogeneous people actuated by the same spirit. The population is now overburdening the land of Japan. Japan must have either more land or more trade in order to feed its people, or it must reduce its standard of living--or lessen the population by emigration.