admit that it is easy for us to believe in the righteousness of “our cause" when our cause and our interests are allied.

A realization of the material character of the bottom causes of many wars is shown by the sentence one sometimes hears, "the causes of all wars are fundamentally economic." This is an elegant way of expressing an idea which might be more shockingly expressed in the words "all wars are fought to make money or its equivalent". The Bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil. Similarly, one might say the love of money is the root of all war. Certainly, it has been the root of much

war.

Yet money is itself merely a medium of exchange. We deal so much in dollars and cents that we often forget this, and therefore forget that what people want is not so much money as the things that money can buy. From the earliest days, traders have sold to people for money the things which the people wanted.

But even in the most primitive stages of civilization, as well as in the highest stages, and in all the stages that lie between, most of the things that have been wanted (especially the expensive things) have not been wanted by the men, but by the women. As a rule, men buy things not for themselves personally so much as for their families. The human male is quite a simple person after all, with very simple wants; and for himself, he seldom wants very expensive things.

The very expensive things are not mere food or mere shelter or mere clothing, but such artificial things as silks, furs, velvets, jewelry, automobiles, fine houses, table appointments, theatre tickets, and in general the luxuries and pleasures of life in cities. If it were not for the luxuries and pleasures of life, men would not congregate in cities, there would be no necessity for foreign trade, and therefore there would not be great competition among nations to increase their foreign trade. Neither would there be any great desire for increased territory and the consequent increased wealth. This means that there would not be much cause of war among the nations.

But, in the world as it actually is, every head of a family, the poor and the rich alike, is impelled by the requirements of his family to make as much money as he can. This produces auto

matically great competition among men to make money. Money can best be made by industrial and manufacturing work on a large scale. The exportation of articles manufactured, and their sale by the great commercial agencies engaged in foreign trade, cause the flow to our cities of the natural and the manufactured products of other lands: and these are bought with money.

Of course, it would be unfair to say that it is the demands of the women for luxury and pleasure that have brought on the wars. But it must be admitted that it is the inborn instinct of men to protect and care for women and their children; that it is the inborn instinct of women to demand from men the utmost of protection and comfort that is possible; and that it is the women who have brought to bear on the men the real pressure which has made them struggle to make money. This instinct on both sides is, doubtless, perfectly natural and proper. So, doubtless, is the endeavor to make money; because it has been the endeavor to make money (or its equivalent) which has gradually produced civilization.

Nevertheless, it cannot reasonably be denied that the intense desire of a very great number of women for luxury and pleasure has brought about a tremendous striving for money: in fact one reason for the struggle for money has been their desire for luxury and pleasure. Let anyone walk on Fifth Avenue, New York, from Twenty-third Street to Fifty-ninth Street, where land is more valuable than in almost any other place upon the earth, and he will see that three-quarters of the shops are for the sale of women's finery and jewelry, and, in general, of articles of luxury. In that small area, you can get a better conception probably, than in any other area in the world, of equal size, of the fundamental causes of war.

BRADLEY A. FISKE.

JAPAN'S CIVILIAN PREMIERS

BY WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS

It came to pass, in the words of a native Japanese historian, that "the power of the Tokugawas that had ruled an empire for centuries fell to pieces in the space of a single morning." That was the end, too, of two and a half centuries of profound peace, initiated by Iyeyasu Tokugawa, founder of the line of Shoguns and an ancestor of Iyesato Tokugawa, now at Washington. At that epochal crisis in Japanese affairs the northern clansmen, even in the face of certain defeat, were loyal to the Tokugawa Shogunate. But happily for them in their defeat there was opened up a new path toward a larger life. In perfect calm, these defeated northerners resolved that they would seek instruction in the long-banned Christian religion; and many of them, coming to the capital and its chief seaport, Yokohama, sought the teaching, help and intellectual hospitality of the American missionaries who were stationed there. Among the lads from these northern parts were two future Premiers of Japan. One was Kei Hara, born in 1832 at Awomori-once the scene, about 800 A.D., of a decisive battle between the white Aryan Ainu and the southern Japanese. The other was Takahashi, from Sendai, whose feudal lord in the seventeenth century had sent an embassy to Europe, by way of Mexico.

"Hara" means prairie, meadow, or moor, and the family name is an old one, going back even to the era of mythology, when the Sun-Goddess gave to her grandson, founder of the line of Mikados, for his conquest what we call "Japan," that is, "The Luxuriant Country of Reedy Moors." "Takahashi," also a very old name, reflects the later era of valley-spanning and bridge-building, in the nascent civilization. It does not matter what the "Christian" or personal names of these youths were. The spirit and form of impersonality runs through all the Japanese language, literature, customs and thought. Buddhism knows no such

thing as a personal, self-conscious, indestructible human soul; nor does Shinto extricate the individual from the mass. In the days of feudalism, whose traditions and customs still linger, a man might have a dozen different given names in the course of his lifetime, much to the confusion of the police and the foreign merchant and teacher. It was a common experience for the American professor, in the early 'seventies, on calling the roll of his students in the class room, to have no response to the name, long familiar, of a student looking directly at him. The lad, hearing what had been the accepted cognomen of yesterday, sat there before you, as silent as the sphynx, nor would any active emotion shown by the pedagogue at such apparent insubordination move either tongue or facial muscle. Called on for explanation, the information given by the lad was that the individual, so nominated on the roll, had changed his name. One who looks in the reference books of a decade or two ago will recognize both Hara and Takahashi by their personal records, but not by the "Christian" names borne by them.

Both boys were born in 1854, as Perry's ships sailed homewards. Both also in their hazards of new fortune came to Yokohama, when, after 1860, it had risen out of the swamps and levels but had not yet begun to cover the bluff and hills overlooking Mississippi Bay. Hara at first had the happier experience. Takahashi walked at once into the wolf's den-perhaps we might say was caught in the American eagle's talons. It was not easy at once to distinguish between missionaries and some men on the soil of Japan who have said that they would, if they could, turn the brown people into copper and export them for gain. On the promise of a free education in America, a coffle of Japanese boys were carried across the Pacific. One American, nameless here lest he have living relatives,—it was in the days of African slavery in America and of the dominance of the doctrine and practice of legalized spoliation of Asiatic peoples, concocted a plan for exporting Japanese "coolies" to California. Why not, when the Portuguese had barracoons at Macao, and when fleets of European and Peruvian ships carried cargoes of human freight, “shanghaied” after being plied with liquor, to be practically sold in the states, American and otherwise, bordering on the Pacific?

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Young Takahashi had a hard time of it in America. Happily a slander turned boomerang and helped to strike a blow for liberty. It was the standing joke in the clubs at Yokohama during the dark days of our Civil War, when there were few Americans in Japan and the Alabama was sweeping the seas of our ships, that Perry and Harris had "opened the country to British trade and American missionaries." One virulent specimen of the yellow press charged the American missionaries with this crime of enslaving free Japanese. In reality, the typical American missionaries, Brown, Hepburn and Ballagh, were those who made known the fact to our Government. One, especially, was the Putnam who entered the wolf's cave and put in operation what led to the release of Takahashi and his companions.

I met Takahashi, a plump and well-favored lad, shortly after my arrival in 1870, and lived in the same house with him for several weeks. From him I improved my rudimentary knowledge of Japanese speech. Takahashi is shown in an old photograph in my possession standing plump and hearty, with the inevitable sword, token of the Samurai, which was given to the boy at twelve, held in front of him. Both the boy and the picture impressed me mightily with the strength of that filial piety which is the base of Japanese civilization.

As teacher, interpreter, statesman and viscount, Takahashi has done much for civilization and the union and reconciliation of Orient and Occident. My own personal debt to him, gladly confessed, is one of culture. In Dr. Verbeck's house in Tokio he read to me out of the stories of Japanese literature; fiction, poetry, travels, history and the classics of Bakin, Rai Sanyo, Murasaki, and, most of all, from that "cleverest outcome of the Japanese pen", as Professor Chamberlain calls it, the Tokaido Hizakurigé, a wonderful, witty, sarcastic and informing picture of life on the greatest high road of the empire and of its fifty-three stations, or relays, in the days of spectacular feudalism.

Takahashi was able to talk American and other varieties of English, and he had an idiomatic grasp and true insight into structure and syntax which was always of invaluable service. The literal meaning of interpreter is, in Japanese, tsuji, or "crossroads," and he was an incarnate signpost to both Oriental and