A shrewd, reflective and cynical doorman with whom I sometimes discussed affairs of state in Washington, confided to me on one of the busy days just before the opening of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament that in his judgment there was a peck of trouble about to be turned loose on the American Government.

“Take them Japs and Chinamen,” he said, “they’re coming with bags of problems, and they’re going to dump them on us to sort and solve! And to think we brought it on ourselves!”

There were people nearer to the administration than this anxious observer who said the same thing. “The Far East is a veritable Pandora’s box, and why did we open it?”

I don’t remember ever to have seen in Washington, even in war times, so many responsible people who gave me the impression of wanting to hold their heads to keep them from splitting.

Of one thing there was no doubt—if the troubles that were to be loosed on the Conference were as serious as these serious observers feared, it was better that they be out than in the box, for they were of a nature that, confined, would be sure to explode, but give them time and they might dissolve under the healing touch of light, sun and air.

But why were there people close to things in Washington aghast at the program of the Conference, people who two months before had looked forward to it with confidence and even exultation? No doubt this was explained partly by the realization that cutting down armaments did not necessarily mean long-continued peace; that there must be settlements. When they looked over the problems to be settled, attempted to put themselves in the place of the people concerned, find solutions through agreements which did not require force behind them, they were appalled at the difficulties in the way.

Put the problems which disturbed them into their simplest terms:—Japan could not get enough food on her six big and her 600 little islands for her 60,000,000 people. She was spilling over into China and its dependencies—not merely as a settler, content to till the soil, to work the mines, to sell in the market place, but as an aggressive conqueror, aspiring to military and political control as well as economic opportunity.

China—that is, Young China, the founder of the Republic—said she would not have it, that she must govern and administer her own, and we, China’s friend, were backing the integrity she demanded. But Japan was “in China”—“in” as was Great Britain and France. She had an army and navy to back her pretensions and she could very well say—and did—“Why should Great Britain and France be allowed to hold their political and military control in Hongkong and in Tonkin, raise and train troops, not of their own people but of natives, collect taxes, run post offices, and we be forbidden? If they do these things, and they do, why should Japan not have equal privileges?”

Young China answered this pertinent inquiry: “It was Old China that arranged those things. You are dealing now with a new China, one that does not intend to barter its inheritance, that proposes to rule its own; a China that will no longer submit to having a carving knife applied to its heart.

“What Old China did we inherited and must make the best of, but it is our duty to see that no nation on earth ever again takes from us what we do not willingly give. You must abandon your effort to direct our policies, administer our railroads, keep your troops on our soil.”

What frightened my doorkeeper, who got his views from the press, and the press that got its views from a hundred conflicting sources, was how peacefully Japan’s right to food for her people and China’s right to her own were to be squared. Could the one inalienable right be fitted into the other inalienable right by other means than force? Of course there were many places on the earth beside China where Japan might expand, but search as they would these anxious observers did not find any available spot except in Asia.

One of the chief occupations of these friends of mine in Washington as the peace conference opened was trying to find some territory from which Japan could get her food; something the Conference could “give” her; something that would satisfy her. As things now are such a search must start with the provision that there is nothing for Japan on the Western Hemisphere. Obviously there is no place for her in Europe. Australia will not have her; we will not have her.

“If it were a question of war or restricted immigration,” I asked a Californian in the course of the Far Eastern discussion, “which would you choose?” The look of surprise at the question answered me—“War.” I received the same reply from a Canadian—from an American labor leader—and they were all “pacifists”!

The narrower the confines were drawn around Japan, the more hysterical observers grew in their search, the more they insisted the Conference must “give” Japan something. “Give it Eastern Siberia!” But what right did the Conference have to deal with any part of Siberia? The United States had finally settled her attitude to this suggestion by declaring that she would not consider any partitioning of Russian territory. She refused to countenance the carving up of Russia as she did the further carving up of China. She refused even to recognize the government that was now struggling to plant itself in Eastern Siberia. It was Russia’s problem to take care of the Far Eastern Republic. She must be free, as China must be free, to work out her own destiny.

Then “give” Japan Manchuria! She already had important recognized rights in Southern Manchuria, rights that came from old wars; the territory borders on Korea which Japan holds and governs, and undoubtedly the Conference would not dispute her claim to Korea, since that claim stands on about the same kind of a bottom as England’s claim to Hongkong and France’s to Tonkin. It was the fruit of the nation’s dealing with Old China. This being so and Japan having her established hold in Southern Manchuria and having made a remarkable record, give her the country.

But here came Young China again. “Manchuria is ours,” she said. “We will not recognize the rights that Japan claims through her treaty made in 1915. It really was a treaty with Old China, still alive in our Republic. It was wrested from us by cunning and bribery. There are twenty million Chinese in Manchuria. They have made that province grow more rapidly in wealth in recent years than any other part of the land. They are converting the wilderness, raising such a crop of soy beans as no other part of the earth has ever seen. We propose to stand by our people. We cannot give Manchuria to Japan, nor can we give her Mongolia. Here, too, our people are good, patient, hardy settlers, peacefully converting the wilderness. True, there are great tracts still untouched, but remember that we have surplus millions, and it is here that we expect them to expand.”

What set my doorman and many serious onlookers to holding their heads was that they could not find a place to put Japan; that is, a place to which she would not have to fight her way.

But what are they doing in the search of the earth for something to “give” her? Was it anything but following the old formula that has always gone with wars? Was war anything but a necessary corollary to this way of dealing with the earth’s surface? No nation or group of nations ever has or will give away without its consent the property of another nation without sowing trouble for the future.

Races must settle their own destinies. Japan must settle her food problem by war or by peace, and whether it was to be by the one or by the other depended largely upon Young China. What did Young China think about it? Not a hasty, violent Young China, expecting to convert its great masses in an hour to the Republican form of government that came into being ten years ago, but a moderate Young China, that has stayed at home, that knows its people, that is conscious of the length of time, the patience, the sacrifices, the pain that adapting the mind of China to a new order requires.

What did this moderate Young China think about the relation of Japan to itself? I looked him up and asked.

He made it quite clear that the Republic had come to stay. He did not attempt to minimize its difficulties. He did claim, however, that whatever the surface indications, the whole Yangtze Valley, which is the very heart of the country, is committed to the Republic, and is coÖperating with it. He gave a hundred indications of how from this great central artery running east and west democratic influences are surely and steadily spreading north and south. He showed how in the northern provinces the progress was slowest, most difficult, because here conservatism was strongest, most corrupt. He pointed out how Old China is concentrating in the Peking government all its cunning, its wisdom, its appeal to the old thing, but he claimed, and unquestionably believed, that Young China was going to be too much for it. He went over the southern provinces and showed how in all of them, except Canton, there was a steadily improving coÖperation with the Peking government.

Moderate Young China thinks Canton is wrong in its haste. He does not believe that the people can assimilate the new ideas as rapidly as Canton claims. He believes that its hurry to make over a great country is one of the most dangerous factors in the nation’s present problem. To sustain, guard, and develop the struggling Peking government is his program.

“We are quarreling, to be sure,” moderate Young China said, “but it is our quarrel. We are like brothers who have fallen to beating one another—let a neighbor interfere and both turn on him. China will turn on any nation or nations that attempt to coerce her. She alone can work out her difficulties. She can work out best her disputes with Japan, and if let alone, will do so.”

“Of course,” continued Young China, “Japan must resign control of Shantung, and particularly of the Shantung railroad. Look at the map and you will understand why. If Japan controls the Shantung railroad she can at any moment cut our main rail communication between Peking and Shanghai, destroy the main artery of our circulatory system. She can do more than that. By that control she will be able to cut off the two arteries across the mainland, the Yellow River and the Yangtze. No government in its senses could permit that.

“Nor can we consent to her political and military control, either, in Shantung or Manchuria. But that does not mean, as some people pretend, that we want to drive Japan from our country. No intelligent Chinaman does. We need the Japanese to help us open and develop our resources, to buy our raw material; and Japan needs our market in which to sell. We are willing she should have the fullest economic privileges if she will cease to interfere with our policies and will withdraw her troops.

“If she will coÖperate with us on an economic basis purely and simply Young China will welcome Japan and there are liberal Japanese that will do that. It is only Military Japan, believing in progress by force, that threatens us.”

“How are you going to carry out your program? How enforce it?”

“The economic boycott,” he said. “It has been successful so far. We’ll neither buy of Japan nor sell to her until she gives up her pretensions.”

There is something tremendous in the idea of that great passive three hundred and twenty-five million or more, the greatest single market on earth, and Japan’s natural market, passing by on the other side, leaving the goods untouched on docks and warehouses—but they do it. There are children of China who will refuse a toy to-day if told it was made in Japan, will go hungry rather than eat Japanese food, so they told me, these ardent young Chinamen.

“But if Japan insists on her demands, turns her navy on you?” I asked.

“Ah, then,” said trustful Young China, “our great friend the United States will take a hand. She will not permit Japan to force us.”

This confidence in America’s friendship was China’s strongest card at the peace table. For over sixty years we have been her avowed protector—ever since in 1858 we signed the quaintly worded compact: “They (the United States and China) shall not insult or oppress each other for any trifling cause so as to produce an estrangement between them, and if any other nation should act unjustly or oppressively, the United States will exert their good offices on being informed of the case to bring about an amicable arrangement of the question, thus showing their friendly feeling.”

Faith in the protection of the United States has worked its way far inland, to the very sources of the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers. I am told that many Chinamen in those distant places who never have looked on a white face will point to the Stars and Stripes and say “our friend.”

According to moderate Young China’s view of the case, the work of the Conference on the Limitation of Armament was to persuade Japan that her real economic progress lay in giving up the political and military privileges in China which she believes are fairly hers, as spoils of the late war, and to accept full opportunities of “peaceful penetration”—persuade if possible, force if not!

There was no question of where sympathy lay at the opening of the Conference—it was with moderate Young China. Sympathy for her and suspicion for Japan—this showed in a catlike watchfulness of Japan’s every move, particularly by the newspaper correspondents.

As a rule, newspaper people are instinctively suspicious. It seems sometimes to be the pride of the profession, and a smart characterization of a suspicion has almost the value of a scoop. There was an instance at the opening of the Conference, just after the naval program was announced, when Ambassador Shidehara fell ill of intestinal trouble. It had been announced that Japan could make no reply to the naval program until she had communicated with Tokyo, and somebody remarked brilliantly that the Baron’s illness was probably a “congestion of the cables.” As a matter of fact it turned out that the poor Baron was seriously ill, but the phrase stuck.

At the first press conference given by Admiral Baron Kato there was another evidence of this instinct. An interpreter translated the questions of the correspondent to the Admiral who replied in his native tongue, a delightfully musical voice; you could hardly believe you did not understand him, so understandable did his words sound. Once or twice Baron Kato did not wait for the interpreter to repeat the English question to him, but gave his answer at once in Japanese. Instantaneously there ran around the big circle of men the signal “He understands English.” Any one who has had any experience with a foreign language knows that often one does understand, but cannot speak; moreover, one understands when the question is simple but cannot follow it when involved. The point is simply here, that the moment Baron Kato showed he understood any English, the guards of the men were up. He was a Jap and must be watched. That is, Japan came to the Washington Conference handicapped by the suspicion of the American press and public, while China came strong in our good will.

Was there anything to be said for Japan? I had believed so a long time, but felt that my impressions were treasonable, so contrary were they to the expressed judgment of practically all of my liberal and radical friends—many of them knew vastly more than I did about the Far East—and to the feeling of the general public as I caught it in the press and in conversation. My treason consisted in thinking that although, as a matter of fact, Japan had been doing a variety of outrageous things, if you compared her operations with those of most of us, there was little reason to make a scapegoat of her. I have been impressed often in the last three years that there were a good many people trying to help China by crying down Japan—a practice that has played a mischievous part in history. I felt that we were not giving Japan the fair deal we should, even if we had no other object than aiding China. The books I read, the observers from the Far East with whom I talked, almost invariably were partisan in their attack. They liked one and did not like the other. Everything that one did was understandable and excusable; everything that the other did was oppressive and inexcusable.

The Japanese had not been long at the Washington Conference, however, before their stock began to rise. The delegation was the most diligent, serious, modest body at the Conference, and so very grateful for every kind word! The contrast between the Chinese and Japanese delegations was striking. Nothing more modernized in manner and appearance, democratized in speech, gathered in Washington than the Chinese. They looked, talked, acted like the most sophisticated and delightful of cultivated Europeans. They understood and practiced every social amenity—suave, at home, frank, gay—I have never encountered anything more socially superior than some of the young Chinese. The two delegations were perfectly characterized by a woman friend of mine familiar with both peoples—“The Chinese look down on everybody; the Japanese look up to everybody.” That was the impression. But when it came to diplomacy, the Chinaman was the aristocrat begging favors, the Japanese the plebeian fighting for his rights.

The Japanese seemed to have felt that possibly there might be some intent on the part of their Western brothers to throw them out of China and go in themselves. We cannot blame Japan for such a thought if we review her experience with the West in the last twenty-five years. She was forced into Korea, after China had agreed with her to jointly suppress disorders if they broke out and both of them to withdraw when there was no longer need for their work. It was China’s refusal to abide by the treaty of 1885 that led Japan into war and that brought her, as a result of that war, Formosa, the Pescadores, Liaotung, with Port Arthur and Dalny. We all remember—that is, those of us living then—how only a few days after the treaty with China which gave Japan these territories the Czar stepped in and told Japan that he would “give her a new proof of his sincere friendship” by taking over Liaotung. There was nothing for Japan to do but accept the offer.

Pretty nearly all Europe at once proceeded, as everybody remembers, to give China and Japan further “proofs of sincere friendship.” Germany took over Kiaochow; England, Weihaiwei; France, Kwang chowwan. This is only a little over twenty years ago.

It was Russia’s obvious effort to get Japan out of Korea that caused the Russo-Japanese war, a war which amazed the world by its result, put Japan on the map, very possibly turned her head a bit. She had been studying the West, and the remarkable thing about this country which we call imitative, in studying it she had learned not only its power but its weakness. She had accepted its militarism at its full face value, but she had quickly put her finger on the weak spots in the militarism of different nations. She had seen how corruption, bribery, self-indulgence had weakened the militarism of Russia; she saw how the half-heartedness of France and England in war weakened them, how liberalism and pacifism undermined militarism; she saw how Germany had the pure science and undivided devotion, and she took Germany as her model. And then in 1914 her great chance came. She did exactly what the Prussian would have done if he had been in her place. She joined the strong, her great ally, England, against Germany, for Germany had possessions in China which Japan coveted. She out-Prussianized Prussia in the demands she made upon the corrupt and unstable Peking crowd. There is no shadow of defense for the twenty-one demands, except the defense that she was applying the lessons that she had learned from Russia, from Germany—lessons which she had seen applied, in a modified form, it is true, but still in a form by England and by the United States in the Philippines.

I could never forget all this in Paris. Japan came to the Conference peace table with her treaties—read them in that invaluable compilation of treaties which John McMurray has made and the Carnegie Peace Foundation published. England there sets down her approval; France sets down her approval; they promise the German rights in Shantung to Japan when the treaty shall be made; they promise her the Caroline Islands and the other island possessions of Germany north of the equator. This is all written down in the books, and this was what faced President Wilson when the matter of Shantung was taken up. What were England and France to do? England had gone into a war and we had followed her, largely, so we both claimed, because a treaty had been regarded as a scrap of paper. Were you now to treat other treaties as scraps of paper?

Italy would not have it so. She held France and England to their war promises. And when President Wilson balked, she left the peace table.

One of the things that interested me most in Paris was that Japan never left the peace table. She was apparently willing to trade anything to get that recognition of racial equality denied her, so far as one can make out, because she is so able, not at all because she is an inferior. She hung on, and by the sheer strength of her position, her refusal, whatever she got or did not get to quit the game, came out with a recognition, partial at least, of what may be correctly called her nefarious demands.

And then she found herself with a whole world jumping on her back. She had played the Western game and the West despised her. I could not help feeling in Paris that Japan must have been bewildered a little by the contradictions of the Occident she had tried so faithfully to follow. She saw the doctrine of force she had accepted grappling with the gospel of the brotherhood of man. There are many who think that the brotherhood got the worst of it in Paris. That gospel was driven into the world as never before there. More people were committed to it than ever before. More people realized that it is a power that you must count with in the affairs of nations as well as of individuals. More people accepted it and tried to get together to make it a practical reality. Japan herself bowed before the power of this spirit before she left Paris. She never gave up more because of it than she felt she must, but she gave up rather than quit the game. She was learning. She has been learning ever since. She has never stayed away from any international attempt to bring order to the world. She has had a bevy of her people at every meeting of the League of Nations. She has taken an active part in the work of all of its commissions. In 1919 Japan had eighty-seven delegates at the International Labor Conference held in Washington, and those delegates accepted the radical program there adopted. Japan means to understand the Occident; and she is making the same valiant attempt to ally herself with the best of the Occident that before the war she made to ally herself with the worst.

What we have to remember is that Japan is, like all nations to a degree, a dual nation; there are two Japans—the one clinging to the old militaristic, autocratic notion of government, the other struggling to understand and realize the meaning of a united, coÖperating world in which each man and each nation shall have a chance at peaceful, prosperous living.