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called on all who were not cowards to follow him, and, stung by the taunt, the Kentuckians cast prudence to the winds, forded the Licking, and rushed tumultuously up the barren bluffs on its opposite side. Here a semblance of order was restored, and a march begun along a ridge that was flanked on each side by densely wooded ravines, reaching down to the edge of the river, which at this point took a wide circular sweep.

In these ravines the Indians lay so skillfully concealed that not an inkling of their presence was had until the pursuers were almost upon them. Then the first knowledge came in a hail of bullets, fired at close range and inflicting terrible loss. The next moment the entrapped pioneers were in hand-to-hand conflict with a foe much stronger and not a whit less courageous than they. There could be but one issue. Breaking, they fled precipitately back to the river, the triumphant Wyandottes fast on their heels. Boone, who stood his ground until the flight became general, had the agonizing experience of seeing his son fall mortally wounded by his side. Heedless of his own danger, he stooped, lifted him from the ground, and bore him swiftly down the rocky slope and into the Licking. Above him the massacre continued, about him the bullets rained-his one thought was of the child that had been, the man that was, gasping and groaning in his In vain his devotion, in vain his muttered prayer. Before the river was crossed the death agony had come, and, with a hurried farewell caress, he laid his inanimate burden on the bank and sought refuge in the forest, making his way by toilsome stages to the post whence the expedition had set out with such high hopes. And there, to his greater sorrow and wrath, he found the

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reinforcements whose coming he had urged his companions to await. The Indians had done their bloody work and had escaped. All that remained was to revisit the battle-ground and bury the mutilated, unrecognizable dead.

Yet there was a little more which could in time be done, and Boone played his part in the doing of it. One thousand strong, mounted and armed, the settlers met together from all sections of the western country, crossed the border, and hastened northwards, not halting until they reached the Indian towns of Chillicothe, Pickaway, and Willstown. Before their advance the tribesmen melted away, leaving the avengers to plunder and destroy at will. Great was the desolation they wrought--so great that never again did the red men attempt to invade Kentucky in force. The Battle of the Blue Licks and its aftermath marked, in fact, a turning-point in the history of the settlement of the Middle West. Thereafter, though for long there were sporadic raids, and though for long the Indian continued to roam and slay, the future complete predominance of the white man was assured. And in this knowledge we may well take leave of the settlers and their pathfinder, for whom Fate still held in store much that was romantic and adventurous, and who, in a ripe old age, was, to die as he had lived-well in advance of civilization, and with his gaze turned steadfastly in the direction of the setting sun.

Thus, by men and women of blood and iron, simple folk but brave and true, was the first expansion movement undertaken and completed; thus, in sorrow and suffering, by privation, sacrifice, and almost incredible heroism, was the ground broken for the great harvest of the future.

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T

AMBASSADOR

BY WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS

HE Japanese have the potencies of at least two" white " races in their composite. Beyond all doubt or cavil, their Aryan inheritances in blood and race traits are rich. Their Semitic affiliations are more than probable. If clear vision, tenacity, and perseverance be Aryan traits, then Takahira is rich even to the ideal standard. His life story shows quiet determination, in steady march to the goal, both as boy student and as imperial envoy. Courtesy and ability to see all around a question, and especially the other man's side of it, mark his career.

Kogoro Takahira, who succeeds Aoki as Ambassador of the Emperor of Japan in Washington, knows us Americans. pretty thoroughly. After five years of his earlier manhood as Secretary of Legation in Washington, a year in New York as Consul-General, and with five years' experience as Minister Plenipotentiary in Washington, with knowledge of realities in Korea, Holland, and Italy, he will be no stranger to the curiosities of American civilization. The yellow newspapers, the winds and waves of opinion, the talk of the clubs, the various “situations" on the Pacific coast, whether of labor or of politics, of bluster or of calm judgment, are familiar to him.

Takahira was born in the year that ushered in friendship between the United States and Japan, for Commodore Perry had by his wisdom and conciliation satisfied the Japanese that "the American barbarians would not proceed to acts of violence." One of the comparatively few northern men reaching high office, his home was in Iwate prefecture in the northeast of Japan. Here is Morioka, where one of the last great struggles between the Aryan Ainu and the Yamato, or, as we might say, the Semitic-Malay race, took place in A.D. 801, the victor, Tamura, being thereupon created the first Tai Shogun, or Tycoon.

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Takahira was one of the brighteyed lads who, in the early seventies, gathered from every province of the Empire in Tokyo, under Verbeck and the American teachers. Dressed in silk haori and hakama, the loose-flowing robes of the samurai, each with the two swords of the gentleman, on sandal or clog, yet in the spirit of the new age, and braving age-old feudal fashion, wearing clipped hair instead of gunhammer top-knots, they were already as well trained in the ethics of Bushido as in the exercise of weapons and jiu-jitsu. The plan was to shut up twenty or thirty lads in a room, and on the sea of the English language give them a life-preserver, in the form of an interpreter, during six months. After that they must swim for themselves. I had myself the picked students, for my own work was in chemistry and physics. Komura, now Ambassador in London, much longer than Takahira, was under my charge. I can remember the latter as an exceedingly polite, eager lad, who took his education seriously, while yet full of play at the right time.

Takahira's whole adult lifetime has been given to the work of diplomacy, for on leaving the University in 1876 he entered the Foreign Office as translator. He studied men and the aims of nations as well as books. Foreign polices were incarnated in the Ministers accredited to Japan. The outside public, for example, might be profoundly impressed with the French Minister's brace of gigantic postilions, who rode beside his carriage to overawe the "little brown men " by such colossal specimens of humanity from afar. Takahira, on the other hand, would be very likely to compare the rather diminutive specimens in the rank and file of the red-trousered little sons of Mars who occasionally marched up and down the Tokaido from the camp at Yokohama.

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One must understand these earlier years in order to realize the gravity of Takahira's task, and also to perceive that Japan's alleged "Jingoism" is mostly the figment of our own yellow journals. The young diplomat's training was not only inside the Foreign Office among seals and parchments. Every Japanese patriot, stung with shame, quivered under the long humiliation of extraterritoriality. This was the time of the old school of diplomacy, of fiery Sir Harry Parkes, and the France of Napoleon III., which burned its diplomatic fingers in an offer of military aid to the rebels of 1868 against the Mikado. For many long years, to the wrath of the Japanese, the British redcoats camped on the bluff at Yokohama, while below was a permanent body of French marines. German ironclads flouted Japan's law of hygiene, and convoyed infected German merchant ships. This was before our own Bingham of Ohio, face to face and knee to knee, and with hand on shoulder of certain of Tokyo's great men, had advised stiffening of the Japanese backbone. It antedated Grant's judgment, given outspokenly in Tokyo, that foreign war vessels defying the laws of Japan should be fired on and sunk.

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This was the day, too, and Takahira was in Tokyo during the whole time, when, like a bevy of frightened rabbits, the whole body of foreign Ministers had fled from the capital to Yokohama to be under the guns of men-of-war. Thus even the Imperial and National Governmént of the Mikado was discredited and humiliated. In the Japanese faces of to day we read the long story of insults patiently borne and of victory quietly won. Coming back to the United States as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, in March, 1903, when the Philippines were our possession, Takahira gave a fine address in Philadelphia on "The Position of Japan in the Far East," welcoming the United States, "which has never shirked responsibility in its international relations," as "a member of the sisterhood of Eastern nations," whose aims "we know," said he, "are identical with our own." Never was a truer word spoken.

I met Takahira last in Washington, July 28, 1904, in Arlington, on that beautiful Thursday afternoon when our own Admiral Taylor was laid to rest. He called to mind what I had forgotten, thanking me for an article I had written showing Japan's diplomacy during a thousand years and her humane policy, and especially her regard for forms of international law. The world will some day wake up to the fact that even China and Japan, which have had dealings with each other and with scores of neighbor, subject, or trading nations, had international law before Grotius. China had her own laws of nations during two thousand years. In the same month, on

a later call at the Legation, I uttered my faith that, in the war with Russia, the success of the Japanese on land and sea was a matter belonging rather to science than to the doctrine of chances.

Unfortunately, the long strain broke down the health of the Japanese Minister, and he had to submit to an operation for appendicitis, from which he rallied sufficiently to meet his former schoolmate Komura at Oyster Bay, and to carry to an end the negotiations at Portsmouth, while facing his old friend from Tokyo, Baron Rosen. Then, being in imperative need of recuperation, he was, at his own request, relieved of his post at Washington. The Emperor rewarded him by at once nominating him a member of the House of Peers, making him Baron, and, as soon as health was reestablished, sending him once more to his old post at Rome, where, if news: paper accounts are correct, he has not been happy. At a time when all the wisdom of Japan and the United States may be necessary to settle impending questions, the envoy who is by training, temperament, and abilities most probably the best man suited for the work, is called to Washington. With his cultivated wife, at the Legation on N Street, Takahira may be trusted to do his part well in cementing international friendship.

Personally, after forty years' knowledge of the Japanese at home and abroad, I believe that they will gain social as they have already by sheer merit won other forms of equality, and the race and world will be the better for it.

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