THE RISE OF JAPAN

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 7853, 15 July 1911, Page 9

THE RISE OF JAPAN

INDUSTRIAL ACTIVITY. COMPETITION FROM THE EAST, ‘"There hns been no race war which at the bottom has not been an economic war/* declared Professor W. T. Mills last night in a powerful address he gave in the Newtown Public Library on ,"The Yellow Peril." The lecturer showed that the United States had forbidden the introduction of Chinese and Japanese labour because they were being brought in to bring down the standard of economic living, to cut down the white man. The yellow man was shipped across the Pacific and shot into America for tho express purpose of getting more out of him than could be got out of a white men for tho same job. It was thought that the only way to protect tho white man in what he had already secured in the economic war was to prevent reinforcements of the yellow man's ranks by men who lived on practically nothing. But that didn't settle the question. When the imported labour slopped, factories were dismantled, and the very best machinery in therfi' wap shipped to Japanese and Chinese soil, with the raw material developed by American capital protected by the English, American. German, and French Navies, and bronchi into competition with American labour in the world 8 markets. During the last three years there had been an enormous drop m the export trade between the United States and China and Japan. THE ORIENTAL MARKET. What did all this moan? It meant that the great Oriental market about which England and Germany had been looking at each other with such suspicion; about which Russia and Japan had fought one war and might fight another; about which Japan and the United States were everlastingly talking—had been captured by Japan and China. The exclusion of the Jap and the Chinaman from Australia, New Zealand, SoutTl America, and tho United States did not exclude them from the international markets, and il the yellow did not produoc in these countries they would do so in then’ own, and send their surplus products to the same mhrkets on which the white man relied. In other words it came to this: They must male© up their minds to live- on less rice and produce mor« still than the Chinaman or the China man would get the job. Let them noi think that the Jap was an inferior being. No country had ever achieved «v much progress as Japan bad done during the last quarter of a century. TJiox had learned -what tho stranger had t<v touch, and they improved upon it a* fast as they adapted it. Japan had n greater sense of solidarity amongst hfi population than any other country the world. Hot ability to organise in duetry was just as marvellous as -her ability to build navies, organise armies and carry on campaigns. She would sacrifice anything for tho sake or beating the dreaded foreigner in trade. JAPS AS STUDENTS. There was not a first-class university on earth that had not its group of Japan**© students. There was nothing m art, science and literature, and agriculture and industry that these men were not all apparently studying. They were* going round the world into eveiw nook and comer where there was anything- to be learned, and they were learning n. Over in Australia he heard a roan say Australia could learn nothing from the United States, and then bo went on to say bow strong and great Australia was. because there were no Japs there. lie (the speaker) replied that if there were no Japs in the schools of Australia it was because the Japanese students had discovered there was nothing to be learned In Australia. (Laughter.) As to the mat ter of learning things, in the United States there was not one single industrial or mechanical device or unproved process where the Japanese expert was not on the job, either as a common labourer or student. JAPANESE ACHIEVEMENTS. Some of the greatest achievements of recent yeans had been brought about by Japanese students. The discovery of a process for coping with one of the most fatal of infectious diseases of the human race, that repeated itself in generation after . generation until a whole family was made extinct, had recently been made by a German professor and a Japanese assistant, and the professor had declared that bis Japanese assistant was entitled to as much credit in the final discovery as he was himself. In the Cuban war and the South African war more men died from malaria than from the enemy’s bullets. Japan did things in a better way. In her war with Russia she sent a sanitaxy corps ahead of her army, and it was the discovery of her army medical men in that war that enabled America to take malaria away from tho Panama Canal. Japan bad become a world Power, and would fight for the markets until she got them, 'ihe policy of “ going West ** had been developed to the last limit. People had now got so far- West that they had come agaiiust the East, which . was civilised when we were barbarians and living in tree-tops and sleeping in caves. Japan's civilisation was so old that it seemed* to be new. The sleeping giant was waking up and producing stuff belter ana cheaper than we were. If human progress was to be achieved anywhere it must do so amidst tho-cradles of the old tends of oppression. (Applause.)