Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER H JAPAN: HER PROBLEMS AND CLAIMS Japan's entrance into the life of the world and acceptance of the civilization of the West has not been to her an unmixed blessing. In important respects her problems have become more intense. Her modern system of universal education giving world outlook, ideals, and ambitions to millions of her young men and women; her extraordinary industrial development and international trade bringing wealth and a higher scale of life to millions, but also bringing grinding toil, poverty, disease, and wretchedness to other millions; her new political system giving responsibility for national as well as for local government and causing the entire nation to consider and decide upon international relations and policies; her new ideals as to the value and rights of the individual begetting throughout the nation a spirit of insistence on rights and a forgetting of the importance of service and the necessity of duty; her modern hygiene and her medical and surgical efficiency giving remarkable success in battling with epidemics no less than with the regular diseases, and making possible a lower death-rate and a longer average of life—these many blessings have brought also many new problems. The full discussion of these problems, however, is no part of our plan. We need to consider them only so far as they throw light on the character of the policy which America should adopt in her dealings with Japan. Japan's old policy kept her people at home, almost stationary in numbers and relatively docile and contented. Her new policy opens their eyes to the great world, gives them efficiency in dealing with it, multiplies her millions and fires them with ambition both personal and national. Mighty economic and psychological forces are at work sweeping the enti...