Italy would not have it so. She held France and England to their war promises. And when President Wilson balked, she left the peace table.
One of the things that interested me most in Paris was that Japan never left the peace table. She was apparently willing to trade anything to get that recognition of racial equality denied her, so far as one can make out, because she is so able, not at all because she is an inferior. She hung on, and by the sheer strength of her position, her refusal, whatever she got or did not get to quit the game, came out with a recognition, partial at least, of what may be correctly called her nefarious demands.
And then she found herself with a whole world jumping on her back. She had played the Western game and the West despised her. I could not help feeling in Paris that Japan must have been bewildered a little by the contradictions of the Occident she had tried so faithfully to follow. She saw the doctrine of force she had accepted grappling with the gospel of the brotherhood of man. There are many who think that the brotherhood got the worst of it in Paris. That gospel was driven into the world as never before there. More people were committed to it than ever before. More people realized that it is a power that you must count with in the affairs of nations as well as of individuals. More people accepted it and tried to get together to make it a practical reality. Japan herself bowed before the power of this spirit before she left Paris. She never gave up more because of it than she felt she must, but she gave up rather than quit the game. She was learning. She has been learning ever since. She has never stayed away from any international attempt to bring order to the world. She has had a bevy of her people at every meeting of the League of Nations. She has taken an active part in the work of all of its commissions. In 1919 Japan had eighty-seven delegates at the International Labor Conference held in Washington, and those delegates accepted the radical program there adopted. Japan means to understand the Occident; and she is making the same valiant attempt to ally herself with the best of the Occident that before the war she made to ally herself with the worst.
