If the present position of affairs could be accepted as permanent, there would be no "problem of the Pacific." That ocean would be Japan's home-water. Holding her rugged islands with a veteran army and navy; so established on the mainland of Asia as to be able to make a flank movement on China; she is the one "Power in being" of the Pacific littoral. But as already stated, the verdict of the war with Russia cannot be taken as final. And soon the United States will come into the Pacific with overwhelming force on the completion of the Panama Canal--an event which is already foreshadowed in a modification of the Anglo-Japanese treaty to relieve Great Britain of the possible responsibility of going to war with America on behalf of Japan. The permanence of the Japanese position as the chief Power of the Pacific cannot therefore be presumed. The very suddenness with which her greatness has been won is in itself a prompting to the suspicion that it will not last. It has been a mushroom growth, and there are many indications that the forcing process by which a Power has been so quickly raised has exhausted the culture bed. In the character of her population Japan is in some respects exceedingly rich. The events of the past few years have shown them to possess great qualities of heroism, patience and discipline. But they have yet to prove that they possess powers of initiative, without which they must fail ultimately in competition with peoples who make one conquest over Nature a stepping-stone to another. And it is not wholly a matter of race prejudice that makes many observers view with suspicion the "staying power" of the character of a nation which thinks so differently from the average European in matters of sex, in commercial honesty, and in the obligations of good faith. Many of those who have travelled in the East, or have done business with Japan, profess a doubt that an enduring greatness can be built upon a national character which runs contrary in most matters to our accepted ideas of ethics. They profess to see in the present greatness of achievement marking Japanese national life a "flash in the pan"--the astonishing precocity and quickness of progress of that type of doomed infant which quickly flowers and quickly fades in the European slums and which is known as "The Mongol" to medical science because of a facial peculiarity which identifies it infallibly. "The Mongol" of European child-life comes to an astonishingly early maturity of brain: its smartness is marvellous. But it is destined always to an early end from an ineradicable internal weakness which is, in some strange way, the cause of its precocious cleverness.