And what would happen to British trade, let us inquire, were America to cease exporting raw cotton, to permit our staple to emerge from our land in a manufactured state, only?
The mere suggestion of the thing is sufficient to cause a cold shudder to play down the spinal column of John Bull. But the American people will never play the game of commerce in that way.
A nation has risen in the Far East that is earning high place among enlightened governments, and in all probability the new-comer may already be entitled to permanently rank with the first-class powers of the earth. Japan is day by day a growing surprise to the world.
That the diminutive Island Empire should have been able to humble the Muscovite pride was no greater marvel than that she should in a brief half-century advance from the position of a weak and unknown country to the station of a highly civilized nation. The government of the Mikado is to-day the best exponent of Asiatic progressiveness. And of a people with a capacity to perform in two generations such amazing things who shall dare say what to them is impossible?
Europe has never been in joyful mood over the rise in Japanese prestige, and she was more than reluctant to recognize the New Japan as the dominant force in the East. That a yellow people should claim fellowship with European countries guided by houses of lofty lineage was never believed to be possible. Continental Europe was unprepared to admit that Japan's triumph proved anything beyond a genius in the art of war that was nothing short of a menace to the rest of mankind, and that luck and geographical position helped the Mikado's legions in all ways. The great Hohenzollern spoke of the Japanese as the "scourge of God"; in France the "yellow peril"--a phrase really made in Germany--was seriously debated; while Russia many times sought sympathy from the Christian world on the ground that she was fighting the white man's battle against paganism. Solitary in her preference for the Japanese, expressed in the form of an astute and fortunate alliance, England gloried when her Oriental ally revealed the weakness of the vaunted power of the north that had dared to cast covetous eyes at India. All these nations hold Asiatic possessions, each has aspired to have a say in Chinese affairs, and each confesses to having a panacea for the innumerable ills of the Celestial Empire--each is hungry, likewise, to extend her trade with the awakening Orient.