I have the heartiest admiration for them. They can teach us
much. Their civilization is in some respects higher than our own. It is
eminently undesirable that Japanese and Americans should attempt to
live together in masses; any such attempt would be sure to result
disastrously, and the far-seeing statesmen of both countries should join
to prevent it.
But this is not because either nation is inferior to the other; it is
because they are different. The two peoples represent two civilizations
which, although in many respects equally high, are so totally
distinct in their past history that it is idle to expect in one or two
generations to overcome this difference. One civilization is as old
as the other; and in neither case is the line of cultural descent
coincident with that of ethnic descent. Unquestionably the ancestors of
the great majority both of the modern Americans and the modern Japanese
were barbarians in that remote past which saw the origins of the
cultured peoples to which the Americans and the Japanese of to-day
severally trace their civilizations. But the lines of development of
these two civilizations, of the Orient and the Occident, have been
separate and divergent since thousands of years before the Christian
era; certainly since that hoary eld in which the Akkadian predecessors
of the Chaldean Semites held sway in Mesopotamia.
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