in that sphere than the commercial rise of Germany has been upon the Continent. The nation which is happily our ally in arms must be our rival in trade, the most formidable of all competitors in the East Asiatic market, and eventually elsewhere. Henceforth the Japanese are bound to concentrate every effort upon the work of economic expansion, and the coming generation must make as vast a difference in their industrial position as the generation since Sedan has made in that of United Germany.
Japan's object in the commercial struggle, as in the military, is to achieve supremacy within her sphere. Her aim—and from her own point of view her just and necessary aim—is not to promote European or American trade, but to displace it. And her object in the first case must be not to develop too rapidly the independent and potentially competitive energies of China, but to strengthen her own power and to obtain the same commercial predominance in the Middle Kingdom which we formerly possessed upon the European Continent There is every reason to expect that the awakening of China will be gradual and probably slow. The complete transformation of that market will hardly occur before Japan has placed herself in a position to supply it. The vision of a vast export of cotton, machinery, and 'buckwheat cakes'—to recall one expression of that sanguine enthusiasm in which Americans no longer indulge—flowing from all the centres of Western commerce through the 'open door,' is extravagant, perhaps altogether delusive. The tolerable certainty, on the other hand, is that Japan will increase her proportion of Far Eastern trade faster than that trade as a whole develops. The 'open door' is there indeed, but even 'open doors' are sometimes blocked by that portion of the crowd which is in front. Our allies are so near the open door that their geographical proximity is as great a factor in their favour as would be tariff discrimination in the interest of any other and more remote country.
