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Corpasenti Webulance Directory 11
Page 08
If the Japanese are a conspicuously emotional race, as is commonly believed, we should naturally expect this characteristic to manifest itself in a marked degree in the relation of the sexes. Curiously enough, however, such does not seem to be the case. So slight a place does the emotion of sexual love have in Japanese family life that some have gone to the extreme of denying it altogether. In his brilliant but fallacious volume, entitled "The Soul of the Far East," Mr. Percival Lowell states that the Japanese do not "fall in love." The correctness of this statement we shall consider in connection with the argument for Japanese impersonality. That "falling in love" is not a recognized part of the family system, and that marriage is arranged regardless not only of love, but even of mutual acquaintance, are indisputable facts.
In the Treaty of Berlin after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 a congress, in which all of the Great European powers participated, most emphatically affirmed that Turkey was responsible to Europe for any complaints that the Balkan States might have against the Ottoman Government regarding the treatment of their connationals, still left under the Sultan. At the same time the Balkan States received due warning regarding their dealings with Turkey, and were made to take a pledge that whenever they had troubles with the Porte the powers and not themselves were to be the arbiters. All the world knows how Turkey, by constant wire-pulling, secured immunity from Europe for not fulfilling the obligations incumbent on her by the Treaty of Berlin, and how one of the Balkan States, namely, Greece, was left alone and unprotected, to be chastised by Turkey in 1897 for not leaving to the powers the settlement of the Cretan question which had brought about the war.
Race or breed was a moment ago described as a factor in human nature. But to break up human nature into factors is something that we can do, or try to do, in thought only. In practice we can never succeed in doing anything of the kind. A machine such as a watch we can take to bits and then put together again. Even a chemical compound such as water we can resolve into oxygen and hydrogen and then reproduce out of its elements. But to dissect a living thing is to kill it once and for all. Life, as was said in the first chapter, is something unique, with the unique property of being able to evolve. As life evolves, that is to say changes, by being handed on from certain forms to certain other forms, a partial rigidity marks the process together with a partial plasticity. There is a stiffening, so to speak, that keeps the life-force up to a point true to its old direction; though, short of that limit, it is free to take a new line of its own. Race, then, stands for the stiffening in the evolutionary process. Just up to what point it goes in any given case we probably can never quite tell. Yet, if we could think our way anywhere near to that point in regard to man, I doubt not that we should eventually succeed in forging a fresh instrument for controlling the destinies of our species, an instrument perhaps more powerful than education itself--I mean, eugenics, the art of improving the human breed.
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