Camp-Fires and Guide-Posts; A Book of Essays and Excursions (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1921. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... XII JAPONICA 1 HE plan was to take Paula to Japan, in fulfilment of a promise I made her when she was a little tiny daughter; to have a brief, glorious vacation there, with some collateral trout-fishing; and then to come home and write a luminous, comprehensive, conclusive monograph on the Japanese Problem. This well-laid plan went "a-gley." The first part of the programme rolled off splendidly. But now I come to the second part and find it can't be done. I know too much and too little. Japan is no longer a mere name to me: it is a real country, a wonderful land, a great nation. Its very simplicity makes it hard to comprehend and explain. The Far Eastern Question is too large to be solved by an anthropological dogma, or settled by a snappy phrase. "The Yellow Peril" is an invention worthy of the yellow press. The writers who deal with this nightmare kind of stuff, like Houston Chamberlain and Karl Pearson and the rest, are intellectual neurotics, very jumpy and with a subconscious homicidal tendency. You would not trust them to run a mowing-machine or a trading-schooner. Rudyard Kipling was right in saying, "Oh, East is East, and West is West" but was he right (except by metrics), in adding, "And never the twain shall meet"? In fact they have met already. The temporal reduction of the spatial globe, the commercial ambition of the West, the overflow of the crowded populations of the East, have already brought them together on a long line of contacts. The question now is how shall they live and work together so as to promote the welfare and true happiness of the world. This is not a question to be decided offhand, even by the youngest and most cocksure of anthropologists. It must be worked out slowly, with patient good-will, and careful application of old, general...