well-meaning Americans to whom all foreign nations are objects of suspicion; these good people are unaware that in most foreign countries Americans are regarded as selfseeking, untrustworthy, and vulgar. Individual Americans are very highly regarded, but the American Nation is believed to be aggressive, domineering, unscrupulous, and lacking in the sense of honor. Conscious of the injustice of this view of American character, we ought to guard ourselves against those feelings of suspicion and antagonism toward other countries which are made possible here and abroad by provincial ignorance. When a member of Congress, in a debate in the House of Representatives, can speak of the Japanese and their pigtails," it is evident that there are sections in which the schoolmaster's task is not finished.

This lack of knowledge of the transformation of the East and its rise to power is the more significant in this country because Americans have had so large a share in these changes. The great part played by American colleges and schools in the recent history of Turkey has been pointed out many times since the Young Turk revolution in that country. The influence of American example and teaching has contributed mightily to the reconstruction of China, and men educated in this country have played a great part in the reconstruction of the Government. It has been said that going about among the most influential officers of state in Peking is very much like going about New Haven when the alumni are in town.

It is not too much to say that the entire modern history of Japan has been imposed upon that country. We forced her, at the cannon's mouth, to re-enter the community of nations, and at the very beginning Townsend Harris, who drew the first treaty made by Japan with a foreign country, expressed the fear that we had destroyed an ancient and in many respects an idyllic civilization. After the United States has forced Japan to abandon a policy of exclusion which had lasted nearly three hundred years, and compelled her to open her doors to Americans, there are men in this country who wish to bar the gates, not only against a host of Japanese, but against the individual Japanese! After the United States has contributed largely to the overthrow of the old order in China, there are Americans who would exclude all Asiatics from this continent. This is certainly a curious view of international responsibilities.

From the standpoint of even elementary ethics this country, which has assumed the responsibility of waking up the East, ought to give it helpful friendship and loyal cooperation. If the men who are leading a movement which would reverse the far-seeing and generous American policy in the East, interpreted by Perry and Harris and many other able men in Japan, and by Burlingame and Hay in China, and substitute fear and suspicion for friendliness and courtesy, could understand the value of the friendship which the large-minded and humane policy of the National Government has fostered in the East and its importance in the near future, they would be the first to oppose it as un-American, unchristian, and short-sighted.

The pathetic feature of this anti-Asiatic agitation, with its fostering of race prejudice and international distrust, is that it is entirely unnecessary. The flow of emigration from East to West can be regulated by diplomatic action between the Governments in friendly conference, and ought to be regulated in that way because that is the civilized way of dealing with such matters. If the German Government should adopt stringent and drastic legislation affecting the interests of American residents in Germany, as the Russian Government did in the matter of American travelers in Russia, without consulting our Government or recognizing its interest in the welfare of Americans in that country, can any one doubt the indignant protest which the Government and people of the United States would make? Technically, the sovereign power of Russia over conditions of citizenship and property-holding might be beyond question; but, in international as in personal relations, there are not only technical rights; there are sensibilities, feelings, the sense of dignity. No people are more sensitive to attitude and manner of treatment than Americans; none would be quicker to resent any kind of slight.

The sooner we rid ourselves of any lingering provincial feeling of superiority, the sooner shall we take the leadership in international affairs which the genius of our free popular life not only fits us for but imposes on us. In dealing with the Eastern peoples we are dealing with our equals: they understand as clearly as we the necessity for control and limitation of emigration; we can gain the protection we need without disregard of feelings and sensibilities of nations as proud and sensitive as ourselves.

T

WENTY-ONE thousand peasants on the ever-green island of Sakurajima, at the head of Kagoshima Bay in southern Kyushu, Japan, had greeted the new year with true Oriental reverence and piety by hanging straw prayers in front of their modest mud huts. They had asked for nothing more on that great Japanese festival day than a continued state of prosperity on their little island kingdom in Satsuma. But this year is the year of the tiger in Japan, and fiercely has the tiger already shown his savage nature. To the famines in northern Japan has been added a still greater calamity. The harmless somnolent island of Sakurajima (cherry island) suddenly awoke, and a tremendous volcanic eruption deprived these twenty-one thousand peasants of homes, properties, and farms. To-day this mountain island is an imposing heap of ash with a deep and dangerous crater yawning from its sleep of one hundred and thirty-five years, for in the year 1779 occurred the last eruption on this mountain.

According to Japanese folk-lore, Sakurajima was formed in a single night in 718 A.D., when it rose mysteriously out of the bay to a height of 3,800 feet. Since then the mountain has been active at various times, but during the last hundred years the old lava beds turned again into soil and the island became covered with forests and brush.

It was a picture of rare beauty, an objective for travelers, the admiration of Satsuma, and the green-grocery of Kagoshima. Twenty-six miles in circumference, the island occupies a prominent, sentinellike position two miles from the city of Kagoshima, a city which was the former home of the bravest warriors under the ancient feudal lords of Satsuma.

How this mountain-island was laid in ruins, and how earthquakes with accompanying panics depopulated for a time Kagoshima of its seventy thousand inhabitants, the writer will relate from his own experiences.

During a full day and night the inhabitants of Sakurajima and neighboring cities and villages for thirty miles around were warned by continuous earthquakes. These quakes were

not serious, yet annoying and distracting. Very naturally, the people of southern Kyushu, and especially the citizens of Kagoshima, were high-strung and excited on the morning of January 12, when the center of the shocks was found to be near the city.

As usual, I had admired quiet and staid old Sakura out in the blue bay, a perfectly charming background for the quaint white sails of fishing-junks. No setting could have been more peaceful. On reaching school, I taught my eager twelve-year-old boys the word "earthquake "just as a violent shock swayed the building. The hour was no sooner ended than the entire school was in a riot. Up from the Kagoshima side of the mountain grew an immense cauliflower of ash clouds. One billow after another rolled aloft, and in a moment what seemed a giant pine tree stood forebodingly as if out of the water, spreading its branches and shadows over the entire island. Directly another grew from the far side of the mountain. The children screamed with amazement and delight, but grown-ups were struck speechless. Was it real or a dream? It was only too real. The roaring, thundering eruption was shaking the air like Gatling guns. besieging a fort with a thousand shots a minute, and truly war, in Sherman's sense of the word, was on. Assembly calls of bugles gathered the school-children and dismissed them, thereby turning loose in the narrow streets thousands of youngsters whose cries mingled with the general exclamations of the populace.

Before stone Buddhas, earth gods, water gods, and the goddess of mercy the unenlightened knelt in prayer. Before the little shrines in their own gardens mothers clasped their hands and implored the spirits of their ancestors for protection. Holy worshipers hastened to the temples, there to appease the wrath of the mountain god Kompira, who was thundering in the distance. Holy bonzes interceded and prostrated themselves low before the divine Buddha.

On the water-front of Kagoshima sampans were already arriving with refugees. Many of these had seen the earth swell and filed

before the surface broke. The majority, however, left the island only after the eruption began. Hundreds of sampans (the small Japanese fishing-boats) and several large passenger steamers carried on the work of rescue all day long, and Kagoshima harbor was a pitiful sight. Women separated from their beloved ones wept and cried, but none were hysterical. The blasé, unemotional East was put to the test, and proved true to its firm character. Yet there was a stir and a shouting of intense excitement. New arrivals would hardly wait for the boat to land before leaping out and telling the story of those left behind. Properties consisted almost wholly of bedding and clothing, and what poor stuff it was ! Quilts, patched and repatched, faded and worn, and handed down from great-grandparents, were still doing service. An assortment of clogs accompanied every bundle of clothing. Rusty tin cans served as storage boxes for the family's treasures of hairpins, hair-oil, tobacco pouches, and pipes. The hibachi, a wooden brazier, was not forgotten. Truly, here was poverty. What could these poor farmers afford to lose? One old man clung frantically to a bird cage. The little songster had cheered him in his old age, and his owner would not requite such kindness with desertion. The crippled, the halt, and the maimed were carried away on shoulders, and women in travail, caught unawares, were taken off the boats more dead than alive.

These twenty-one thousand destitutes may never be able to return to the island, which is now largely a barren, ashen, and cinerous hulk. Behind them they left their terraced vegetable fields and gardens, representing labor of a hundred years or more. Wonder

ful it is how these farmers climb up the mountain-side and wrest from its rocky soil a living for a large family. They left behind mud huts carefully thatched-their homeshorses, ponies, fowl, and swine. All of these, their lands and implements, were suddenly wiped away. Few of these unfortunates had relatives elsewhere. These islanders were a clan, with their own dialect. For a hundred years they had intermarried, and were now one large family, all of them earning their bread by sweat of brow. Today they are scattered over the whole of Japan. Those who were near the island on rescue missions compared the immediate scene to a Port Arthurian naval battle. Glowing masses of pumice fell around the boats like

shells in a bombardment. Scoria all about hissed and steamed in the water. Boulders and rocks were hurled hundreds of feet in the air, only to drop back again into the fiery pits. Tremendous steam pressure was being released through molten rock, and the glowing, stringy substance fell slowly in showers to the earth. Villages were under a constant rain of fire, and soon the flames spread in the forests. The cloud of ash was by this time fully twelve thousand feet high.

In Kagoshima business was at a standstill, excepting for a run on the banks, which closed at noon that day. Refugees crouched forlornly on the steps of public buildings or walked the streets with their entire earthly possessions on their backs. Elderly women, bent with age, dragged themselves from shop to shop, not knowing where to go. They had probably never been off the island. Buddhist temples and Shinto shrine grounds were soon filled with the homeless. Carts were rattling through the city with big loads of bedding, and the entire population seemed to be moving. So it was. Those near the water-front were already escaping to the hills back of the city. A panic cry about serious inundations had somewhere arisen and those who could prepared early to avoid a flood. The railway station was jammed with the well-to-do who were more able to remove their families to distant places of safety. No first or second class tickets were sold. The disaster was a wonderful democratizer, and the banker and his coolies shared common seats. Meanwhile the poor began a long procession on country roads that led to nowhere. This procession lasted for two full days, and many knew not where they would eat or sleep.

Earthquakes were not so numerous now that the terrific force had found an outlet, but the concussions of air rattled continuously every window in town and hammered unmercifully on the shoji—the loose sliding doors of the lightly built Japanese houses. The noise of these unceasing blows, together with the increasing thunder from the volcano, was deafening. Many a sliding door dropped out from its socket and frightened people into the belief that their house was being shaken to pieces.

At noon the mountain was already hidden from view and ashes began to fall in Kagoshima, two miles across the bay. In the midst of uncertainty and darkness, with the volcano rumbling and thundering, a violent shock at half-past six set seventy thousand

The volcanic island of Sakurajima lies just across the bay. The island is 26 miles in circumference, and its highest point, the volcano, is 3,800 feet in height