Harris & Ewing

true way for one culture to triumph over another. War is death to the culture that attempts that way of expanding.

The truth is, if people believe in their own form of culture, and believe it with so much faith and zeal that they want to impress it on the rest of the world, then the one thing to avoid is the effort to achieve the purpose

through war. War is fatal to the spread of a people's culture. That is one of the supreme lessons of the recent war. Germany was conquering the world, until she took to the sword. Many aspects of German culture were being adopted by nation after nation. Much of our humanitarian legislation in America during recent years, such as workmen's

compensation laws, old age insurance, and the like, came from Germany. When the platform of the Progressive Party in America was adopted, with its emphasis on social welfare, three-fourths of it was made in Germany. But when Germany tried to make the world accept her culture at the point of the sword, she set herself back by decades, or probably centuries.

War is not the way for a culture to commend itself to those who have not had it. All that is needed is for each race to become familiar with the culture of the other and to understand it. After mutual understanding will come mutual tolerance, and after mutual tolerance will come whatever is to be the outcome of this competition between different cultures in the Pacific. What will actually happen and what has happened so far is that we will absorb some things from Japan and Japan will absorb some things from us. Japan has already absorbed many things from us. The most obvious is our form of dress. She has also adopted, partly from Anglo-Saxons and partly from other countries, many other aspects of culture, like her military system, her medical science, and her constitution. It is quite evident that the present tendency of Japan is to take on a good deal of our culture pretty rapidly. If I felt very intimate with the Japanese, if I felt I knew them well enough

to give them unsolicited advice, I should feel inclined to suggest that they consider very carefully whether they are not taking on more of our culture than is best for them; or, at least, whether they have not been trying to take it on more rapidly than they can comfortably digest it. To speak of a minor and unimportant thing first, I never see a Japanese man or woman dressed in American clothes without regretting that they have discarded their very much more beautiful and dignified Japanese costume. Every time I saw the Japanese delegates at the conference at Washington, I could not help thinking that they would be much more dignified and would command our attention and respect to a greater degree if they held to the manner of dress that is their own. is their own. I think that the Japanese delegates to the conference, if they had marched into the first meeting dressed in their own beautiful national costume, which they have evolved through the centuries, would have been much more impressive. Speaking broadly, the whole tendency just now, both of Japan and of China, seems to be to discard much that is their own and substitute ours for it. They seem to be in a hurry to take on our institutions and customs in a variety of ways. Japan has been doing it for half a century and China is just starting in on a course of adopting Anglo-Saxon manners and institutions with a