And there was a lot more to
the same effect.
This is of course the Asiatic way of looking at things. There may be
something in what he says about the continuity of female influence
softening our Western civilization. Certainly the present war shows
that the Japanese women, who were only yesterday altogether Oriental
in habits and ideals, have produced a race of strong men, so far as
physical daring and hardihood is concerned. The influence of women on
these men ceased with childhood--even then it was a Spartan influence.
More than this, the Japanese generals and statesmen, nearly all of
whom are above sixty, were the product of Japanese civilization before
modern ideas had even been sown in the Island Empire. Oyama and
Kuroki, Ito and Katsura, and all the rest, are the offspring of purely
Asiatic conditions, uninfluenced in the slightest degree by Western
thought or custom; and yet the state of society which brought forth
these men is unfamiliar to American and European peoples.
But even if what this Oriental assailant of our customs terms the
overcharge of femininity in Occidental society does mellow us, it does
not follow that it weakens us. Anyhow it does not affect what I say
about the influence of the mother upon the purposes and "principles"
of young men.
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