The marvelous rise of the Japanese is due to the seizure of the
opportunity of education, and appropriating every detail that goes to
make power and physical influence.
Not much more than three generations ago, the Japanese empire was a mere
name, an isolated country of semi-barbarians, a mere tribe without
power, influence or standing as a national unit. It is now clamoring at
the door of every civilized nation for recognition as a world power, and
threatens to enforce its demands with an army and navy that is too
formidable to be ignored or slighted.
It has reached the acme of the physical and lays claim to that alone as
its right to recognition. It has not yet learned that in the great
movement of the peoples of the earth toward unification, the physical
must go down before the psychological, and therefore, if the Japanese
persist in their physical prowess, they will disappear as have other
greater nations claiming the same force as the summit of earthly
influence. They are mere fragments of a tribe detached from the Turanian
division of the human family.
History repeats itself always in the cases of the great divisions of the
human family, where some branch attempted to usurp the power, functions
and authority of the whole.
The Assyrians, the Persians, the mighty mistress of the world, the Roman
Empire, vanished like a breath when they presumed to stand in the way of
the designs of the Almighty.
All were pawns upon the chessboard of time, so to speak, the very
foundation of which is soul, that attempted to wrest the fiat from its
meaning by the adoption of brute or national force.
They served the purpose of carrying man toward a certain goal on the way
to his final pinnacle, then claimed the results of the uplift, and went
down through vanity and presumption.
Japan with its physical impress persisted in, will go down like the
rest. It must go down because it does not represent any factor in the
Divine designs. But it is an illustration of what education will
accomplish, and its fate will illustrate what human nature, obsessed by
its own reliance upon force, will reach in the end.
Our Colored Americans have no such incentive as force or physical
designs. The conquerors of the earth were compelled to yield to the
educational programme to uplift the soul of man, not his material
prospects, except so far as they advanced the psychological, and they
may be said to be now in that psychological phase of the movement of the
nations of the earth, which leads to the highest point of intensive
civilization.