T is of little use to argue any more about
the proba- bilities of war and peace. the decision rests with the Czar, who either will or will not submit to a great diplomatic defeat at the hands of the Japanese. There is no compromise visible that will work ; and for our own part, we have difficulty in believing that the Czar will re- treat. He did not expect war, and he prefers peace ; but the advance of his dominion to the North Pacific was originally his own pet idea ; he is still not quite convinced that Japanese power is real ; and though he has a strong peace party by his side, Russia is, when all is said, a military despotism, and in such organisations it is usually the party of action which prevails. The Czar has taken the negotia- tions out of the hands of his Viceroy, Admiral Alexeieff-- whose pacific speech on the subject was obviously intended to justify himself in the eyes of his own following as a man overborne by superior authority—and he may therefore at the last moment summon up moral courage for that most painful of operations, retreat before an enemy who looks smaller than himself ; but we do not think he will. The delay, however, can hardly exceed ten days ; and as we cannot pretend to know what passes in the Czar's private Cabinet, or in the room where the Genro, or "Elder States- men," of Japan arrive at their conclusions, we prefer to employ the interval in discussing the very remarkable opinions about Japan which Mr. Herbert Spencer had thought out. They are embodied in a letter to Baron Kaneko, a Japanese jurist and politician of high stand- ing, dated August 20th, 1892, which, however, was not to be published until after the philosopher's death, as Mr. Spencer, he says, 'did not desire to rouse the animosity of his fellow-countrymen."
The letter would have roused no animosity, the philoso- pher mistaking the character of his countrymen, who allow philosophers, as they allow the clergy, to say, and even teach, a great many things in which their audience; outwardly reverential and really respectful, do not in the least believe. They would simply have remarked : "Mr. Herbert Spencer is opposed to everybody else. How odd." The letter is indeed an odd one, but it is well worth studying, first, because it is one more contribution to the proof that doctrinaire philosophers do not see more clearly than politicians ; and secondly, as evidence that philoso- phers, once convinced of a doctrine, will often support it by the most inapplicable arguments. Mr. Spencer's actual advice to his friend was positively futile. He feared that Japan would one day be conquered by white men, and therefore wished the Japanese to keep up, or rather to rebuild, their ancient wall of exclusion, but to allow ingress freely to commodities and ideas. He might as well have advised them to build a wall with a river flowing through it, or with a battery pouring shells upon its buttresses. He seems not to have per- ceived that an unchangeable polity must always rest on a stereotyping of wants, with which Free-trade is hopelessly inconsistent, and that ideas are of all imports the most irresistible solvents. His own books, for example, which for years governed the intellectual life of Japan, must have dissipated—or at least that would have been his own conclu- sion—a thousand prejudices, and altered wherever they pene- trated the habitual rules of Japanese conduct. He advised the Japanese Government not to allow any foreigners to hold land either in freehold or by lease, or to occupy houses except in annual tenancy, entirely forgetting that many of the oldest tenancies in England are those of families who hold at will, but whom the landlord never finds it profitable or convenient to disturb. He wished the law of extra-territoriality never to be repealed, quite forgetting that its usual effect is to promote the foreign In truth, we tone of us know much about the laws of race. The Japanese are supposed to be Mongols crossed with some aboriginal, possibly Australoid, tribes ; and fifty years ago any one who had predicted that they would remain independent and uncrossed, yet would derive from contact with Europe a new vigour, would organise their community like a European State, would be admitted diplomatically among those States, would build and navigate ironclads for themselves, would found an Army which as its first exploit would hold China to ransom, and would stand up unblenching before the greatest of military Powers, would have been pronounced a foolish dreamer. Yet all these things are admitted to have happened. By throwing her doors widely open to Europe Japan may have destroyed her happiness— we do not know—but she has undoubtedly multiplied tenfold the external strength and safety for which Mr. Herbert Spencer was concerned. So far from sacrificing her independence, which he thought the inevitable result, she is now the 0113 Asiatic State whose territory no European Power, for fear of consequences, would volun- tarily invade. So far, at all events, the English philoso- pher has been wrong, and the Asiatic statesmen in the settlements which he desired to avoid; and, above all, he ,right, though none of us know precisely why. objected to any intermarriage between Europeans and Japanese. That he would positively prohibit by law. His argument upon this point is so extraordinarily well expressed, and embodies so perfectly the popular convic- tion or prejudice upon the subject, that we quote it entire " Intermarriage," says Mr. Silencer, "is not at root a question of social philosophy. It is at root a question of biology. There is abundant proof, alike furnished by the intermarriages of human races and by the interbreeding of animals, that when the varieties mingled diverge beyond a certain slight degree the result is inevitably a bad one in the long run. I have myself been in the habit of looking at the evidence bearing on this matter for many years past, and my conviction is based on numerous facts derived from numerous sources. This conviction I have within the last half-hour verified, for I happen to be staying in the country with a gentleman who is well known and- has had much experience respecting the interbreeding of cattle ; and he has Just, on inquiry, fully confirmed my belief that when, say of the different varieties of sheep, there is an interbreeding of those which are widely unlike, the result, especially in the second generation, is a bad one—there arise an incalculable mixture of traits,. and what may be called a chaotic constitution. And the same thing happens among human beings—the Eurasians in India, the half- breeds in America, show this. The physiological basis of this experience appears to be that any one variety of creature in course of many generations acquires a certain constitutional adaptation to its particular form of life, and every other variety similarly acquires its own special adaptation. The consequence is that, if you mix the constitution of two widely divergent varieties which have severally become adapted to widely diver- gent modes of life, you get a constitution which is adapted to the mode of life of neither—a constitution which will not work properly, because it is not fitted for any set of conditions what- ever. By all means, therefore, peremptorily interdict marriages of Japanese with foreigners."
That paragraph will be accepted by the majority of our readers as a sort of quintessence of wisdom because it appears to justify a decision long since arrived at in their own minds ; but in truth it rests upon far too small a, basis of evidence. We know for certain absolutely nothing of the early interminglings of the races,—whether the Greeks and Romans were or were not of pure European blood ; whether the Jews, who produced Isaiah and St. Paul, were or were not crossed with dark Canaanitish tribes ; whether the Magyars, at present one of the finest and most hopeful breeds in Europe, are or are not the progeny of Huns and Avars crossed with the European women they found in their place of final settlement. Even in modern times we know little of the results of intermarriage, for the weight of opinion in the white races has produced the precise result which Mr. Spencer desired to produce by law, has, that is, pro- hibited intermarriage, and has thereby given the world degraded races bred in the bazaars and untrained in the healthier morale of the race of either father or mother. Mr. Spencer may be quite right after all; but the only bits of positive evidence are the vitality and intellectual force which a thin strain of Jewish blood communicates to the families that possess it—John Bright sprung from such a family—and the history of the house of Othman, and neither of those series of facts in any degree supports Mr. Herbert Spencer's conclusions.
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