NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13464, 17 April 1907, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

JAPAN AND AMERICA

"Air. the .sensational journals in the United Stales may fill (heir columns from top to bottom with yelijw monkeys gibbering war against, .Japan, but they cannot, make war. There will be no war between the United States and .Japan arising out of such a purely local question as to whether some 90 .Japanese pupils, adult, and juvenile, shall be permitted to attend the San Francisco public schools. Japan has entered the family of civilised nations. Those nations avert wars in this age by the exercise of mutual respect, patience, and consideration for one another's traditions and peculiarities. So long as those qualities are kept in active exercise in diplomacy, no two serious and civilised Governments are likely to plunge their countries into war over a trivial cause." 'these are the words of an eminent diplomatic official of the United States Government, spoken with authoritative emphasis at a time when the streets of many American cities were ringing with the cries of newsboys vending sensational journals proclaiming in glaring headlines that war between Japan and the United States was '"inevitable." The distinguished official continued There exists in San Francisco a practice in the administration of the public schools which, if persistently continned, and if accompanied by sufficiently irritating comment, is conceivably capable of leading to war. Hut such a result could only follow incredible obstinacy on the part of local officials, and the utter abandonment of the ethical qualities that I have named as guiding influences in modern international relation*. It, is easy enough for the long-distance theorists who are dealing in conjectural international futures to predict that at some time or other there will be a contest, whether in diplomacy, in commercial rivalry, or at arms, between the United States and Japan for supremacy in the Pacific and the control of the Oriental market. Volumes of speculation could be written upon that subject, but they now would be only of academic value. "■