In a striking letter in Monday's Times, Admiral Mahan, who
spent a year in Japan in early life, deals with the friction between America and Japan. He readily admits that Japan has made good her claim to be regarded as one of the Great Powers of the world. None the less, he firmly maintains that there is no necessary connexion between a nation's status as a Great Power and her right to receive for her people the privileges of immigration and naturalization in the territory of another State. Opponents of this view, he submits, ignore certain conspicuous facts, notably that the policy of a nation must rest on the popular will, and that the will of the people, so far as it has been expressed in America and Canada, is distinctly contrary to the concession of immi- gration which, in America at any rate, inevitably implies naturalization. Secondly, they assume that the Westernization of Japan has in two generations so changed Japanese racial characteristics as to make them readily assimilable with Europeans. This, he asserts, the Japanese in their pride of race would be the first to deny. Moreover, it ignores the whole background of European history and civilization which the most squalid European immigrants possess in common with the Americans.
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