402 THE CLASS STRUGGLE ARMED PEACE ON THE PACIFIC 403 fall of the Yamamoto ministry, and a scandal at the Waka Matsu Steel works resulted in the suicide of the chief engineer, who was at the same time a high military officer.
The masses are beginning to see the light. In the Far Eastern Review of Shanghai of March, 1918, we read under the title Bolshevism Contagious, Japanese journals have been remarking with some consternation, others with satisfaction, that the one development of the great European war which has stirred the masses of the Japanese people to intelligent interest has been the rise of the Bolsheviki. The announcement of the ethical tenets and war purposes of France, Great Britain and America has made a painfully small appeal to the Japanese as their journalists have frankly admitted, but the chaotic rise of the illiterate Russian masses has proved to be of engrossing interest. One sees in the liberal Japanese papers more and more comment in recent months upon the limitation of suffrage, upon the autocratic manipulation of public affairs by the militarists, upon the age and conservatism of the members of the Genko, and upon the heavy taxation and misery of the masses who are now said to be anything but patriotic except when under arms. We hear now, that the time has come for the second revolution, that under the bureaucracy no strong young men are being developed, and that strong old men who rose to eminence after the first revolution are not alive to the needs of the age. radical society has recently been organized among the university students and graduates which announces a program that must look very Bolshevistic to the bureaucrats and which was suppressed by the police at the first meeting at Kanda. There is no reason to look forward to violence and revolution in Japan but there is every reason to believe that there is enough interest and sufficient yearning after a more democratic form of government to force from the bureaucracy some very important concessions, within the next few years. The spokesmen of the old school have been announcing emphatically of late that Japan is not fighting to make the world safe for Democracy, but the keen popular interest which the press and the people are taking in the collapse of autocracy in Russia would seem to indicate that the rulers and the people are not so much of one mind and thought as the former would sometimes have us believe.
The editor of the Far Eastern Review thinks there is no reason to look for revolution in Japan, but that the government will become more democratic within the next few years.
We know better on this point. We know that the bureaucracy has become more and more conservative and reactionary, we know that the present regime cannot develop liberal tendencies or concessions, and that it will not give in to the just demands of the people as provided in the five articles of the constitution.
Nor will the coming peace solve the Eastern question automatically. Even if Prussian militarism is crushed and Siberia is invaded, there will still be left the militarism of several armed nations that have vital interests in the Pacific and that are ready, each, to fight for its own purpose. The end of the war, instead of removing the danger, may bring it closer.
The workers of these countries, however, have no conflicting interests, and therefore have no quarrel with each other by adhering to these interests. They must not leave matters to the capitalists to decide as they think best for themselves. The workers must not accept views which are foreign to their interests such as those of Bernard Shaw, to the effect that the Japanese and the English cannot understand each other, or the views of any one else who construes things so as to split the working class by lines of color, or odor, or some other quality which has nothing to do with the matter.
We do not care in how many ways the workers of one country may differ from another, both can understand that two and two make four, and both can solve scientific problems, the Japanese as well as the English. The domination of the white race will break down, not to be replaced by a new domination, but by the equality of races, by the absence of the dominion