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This book has been optimized for viewing
at a monitor setting of 1024 x 768 pixels.
Send
 Send
Why People Email So Badly
and How to Do It Better

DAVID SHIPLEY
and

WILL SCHWALBE

Alfred A. Knopf New York 2008

 THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2007, 2008 by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Microsoft product screen shot reprinted with permission
from Microsoft Corporation.
A portion of “A New Last Word” originally appeared on
www.changethis.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shipley, David, 1963­
Send : why people email so badly and how to do it better /
by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. — Rev. ed.
p. cm.
“A Borzoi Book.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN: 978-0-307-27061-0
1. Electronic mail messages. 2. Business communication.
3. Communication in management. 4. Interpersonal communication.
I. Schwalbe, Will. II. Title.
HD30.37.S5 2008
658'.054692—dc22 2008010346

v1.0
 WS:
For David Cheng
And Mary Anne and Douglas Schwalbe
In Memory of David Baer and Robert H. Chapman

DS:
For Rosa and Joseph
And Joan and John
 CONTENTS

Introduction Why Do We Email So Badly? 3

Chapter 1 When Should We Email? 17
Chapter 2 The Anatomy of an Email 56
Chapter 3 How to Write (the Perfect) Email 117
Chapter 4 The Six Essential Types of Email 143
Chapter 5 The Emotional Email 177
Chapter 6 The Email That Can Land You in Jail 206
Chapter 7 S.E.N.D. 225
The Last Word 228
A New Last Word: How to Keep
Email from Taking Over Your Life 231

Appendix: How to Read Your Header 251

Acknowledgments 257
Notes 261
Index 273
Send
 INTRODUCTION

Why Do We Email So Badly?

Bad things can happen on email.

Consider Michael Brown, the director of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, who committed the fol­
lowing thoughts to email during the very worst days of Hur­
ricane Katrina.

From: Michael Brown

To: FEMA Staff
August 29, 2005

Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?

From: Michael Brown

To: FEMA Staff
August 29, 2005

If you’ll look at my lovely FEMA attire you’ll really

vomit. I am a fashion god.
4 S e n d

From: Michael Brown

To: FEMA Staff
August 30, 2005

I’m not answering that question, but do have

a question. Do you know of anyone who
dog-sits?

Or consider the events of 2007—a year when electronic

communication was at the center of one mortifying mis­
hap after another. Email played a starring role in the scandal
over the Bush administration’s firing of nine U.S. attorneys,
in an embarrassing Wal-Mart lawsuit, in the fall of Star-
wood’s CEO, in the travails of two northeastern governors,
in the demise of Representative Mark Foley of Florida,
and in the combustible romantic lives of space shuttle
astronauts.
Or simply consider the first days of 2008, just before this
new edition went to press: a lawyer for Eli Lilly mistakenly
sent a highly confidential email to a reporter at The New York
Times (he meant to send it to a colleague with the same last
name as the reporter—thank you autofill!); the most power­
ful prosecutor in Texas decided not to run for reelection
because of offensive and amorous emails he had sent via his
government email account; Detroit’s mayor got in hot water,
and his chief of staff resigned, after text messages gave proof
to the romantic relationship they had previously denied
under oath; and that rogue trader at Société Générale, the
one who lost more than $7 billion, explained in glorious
 Why Do We Email So Badly? 5

detail how he used company email accounts to perpetrate

his scheme.
So consider all that. But also . . . consider us.
Once upon a time, we were trying to figure out when we
needed to get a draft of this book to our editor, whom we’ll
call Marty. (After all, that’s his name.) No problem, right? We
were (reputedly) literate professionals—Will, then the editor
in chief of a publishing house, and David, the editor of The
New York Times Op-Ed page—setting a basic timetable. It
wasn’t contentious. It wasn’t emotional. It wasn’t even all
that complicated.
Here’s how it started:

Marty sent us an email—Subject line: “One for the

book?”—about an angry email he had written and regretted
sending.
Why was Marty sending us this note?
David took the email at face value, assuming that Marty
had simply wanted to pass along an anecdote for us to
include. Will, however, suspected that this was Marty’s gen­
tle way of eliciting a status report.
If David was right, the correct response would be simply
to thank Marty for his contribution and leave it at that. If
Will was right, the proper reply would be to email Marty a
detailed memo, giving him a date by which to expect the
manuscript.
David answered promptly, following his instincts. (He
copied Will.)
6 S e n d

Subject: One for the book?

To: Marty
From: Shipley
Cc: Schwalbe

Dear Marty:
Thanks for the anecdote. This will fit right in.
All best,
David

Will started to formulate a progress report, but then,

before he had finished it . . .
Marty sent another email. In this one, he wrote how
helpful it would be to have a portion of the manuscript to
show his colleagues at an upcoming meeting.
OK, this time we both agreed his note was a pretty
unmistakable request for us to send him part of the book.
The problem: we weren’t quite ready. So we needed to figure
out whether getting him part of the book was “helpful” or
“essential.” David thought the former; Will thought the lat­
ter. Regardless of who was right, the ball was now in our
court. So what did we do? We began to panic and behave
like lunatics.
First, we did the worst possible thing: nothing. Days
went by. Perhaps the email would just go away. Then
we wrote a convoluted response—one that reflected our
eagerness to buy ourselves as much time as possible to fin­
ish the manuscript but that was also meant to reassure our
editor.
 Why Do We Email So Badly? 7

Here it is:

Subject: One for the book?

To: Marty
From: Shipley, Schwalbe

Dear Marty:
Thanks so much for yours. The writing is going well,
but we’re not quite there yet. We really want to get you
something for your upcoming meeting, but we’re not
totally sure we can do it in time. We’re wondering how
much of the manuscript you need and the last date we
can get it to you. Is there a part of the manuscript that
you’re particularly interested in having? We have a
complete first draft, but some parts are more polished
than others. Perhaps we can talk next week so that we
can let you know where we’re at and discuss how to
proceed.
All best,
Will and David

And here’s Marty’s reply:

Subject: One for the book?

To: Shipley, Schwalbe
From: Marty

I’m going on vacation next week. Let’s talk when I

return.
8 S e n d

Ouch. Clearly, Marty was fed up with us.

Or not ouch? Was he?
Was he throwing up his hands and saying, “Whatever.
I’m going on vacation”? Or was he simply saying, “This is a
complicated topic. I can’t talk about it right now because
I’m leaving on vacation. I’ll talk to you about it when I get
back”?
By the time we had sorted out our timetable, three weeks
had passed, lots of emails had been exchanged, and a ques­
tion that should have taken one minute to answer had eaten
up hours. We had come face-to-face with two of email’s
stealthiest characteristics: its inherent absence of tone,
which encourages misunderstanding because readers are
able to project all their fears into the simplest of sentences,
sometimes with just cause, and sometimes without; and its
ability to simulate forward motion. As Bob Geldof, the
humanitarian rock musician, said, email is dangerous
because it gives us “a feeling of action”—even when nothing
is happening.
So what is it about email? Why do we send so many elec­
tronic messages that we never should have written? Why do
things spin out of control so quickly? Why don’t people
remember that email leaves an indelible electronic record?
Why do we forget to compose our messages carefully so that
people will know what we want without having to guess? We
wrote this book to figure out why email has such a tendency
to go awry—and to learn for ourselves how to email not just
adequately but also well. Our Holy Grail: email that is so
effective that it cuts down on email.
 Why Do We Email So Badly? 9

. . .

We don’t hate email; we love it. We recognize that email has

changed our lives in countless good ways. We just want to
do it better. And we recognize that if we don’t start doing it
better—and fast—people just might give up on it.
In 2007, declaring “email bankruptcy” became the hypo­
thetical rage (although we don’t know too many people who
actually deleted all their pending emails and started from
scratch), as did email-free Fridays (much announced; sel­
dom adhered to). The governor of New Jersey, faced with
lawsuits to compel him to release his emails, went so far as
to make a big show of swearing off it altogether.
While these were fun stunts to contemplate, they didn’t
do a lot to solve the problems presented by email. They were
predicated on avoidance (not emailing) rather than im­
provement (emailing more effectively). Don’t get us wrong:
we think it’s kind of remarkable that people manage on
email as well as they do.
After all, email hasn’t been around that long. Search for
the term “email” in The New York Times archive for the mid­
1980s and you’re as likely to turn up “Thomas E. Mails”
(author of The Pueblo Children of the Earth Mother) as you
are references to electronic communication. It wasn’t just
that email was rarely used—it had barely been invented:
before 1971, the @ sign was used mostly by accountants and
merchants. There was no official Internet before 1983. The
America Online we all know didn’t exist prior to 1989.
That’s a far cry from where we are today. Trillions of
10 S e n d

emails are sent every week. Office workers in the United

States spend at least 25 percent of the day on email and
countless hours on their handhelds. In 2009, the Bush
administration is expected to turn over more than 100 mil­
lion electronic messages to the National Archives. (The
Clinton administration, by contrast, left behind 32 million
emails in 2001.) All the data shows that email usage is con­
tinuing to grow. According to the research firm DYS Analyt­
ics, electronic traffic nearly doubled between 2005 and
2007. And spam? In 2001, it accounted for 5 percent of
Internet traffic. Now, it’s often 90 percent, with an unhappy
total of 100 billion unsolicited commercial messages sent
every day.
A more detailed history of email lies ahead. The point
we want to underscore here, however, is that this new
technology took over our world in about a decade. Just as
previous generations struggled to integrate first the tele­
graph and then the telephone into their lives, we’re strug­
gling to integrate email into ours. We’re using it and
overusing it and misusing it. Email is afflicted by the curse
of the new.
Still, our difficulties with email can’t simply be blamed
on its youth. They also stem from email’s unique
character—or lack thereof.
If you don’t consciously insert tone into an email, a kind
of universal default tone won’t automatically be conveyed.
Instead, the message written without regard to tone be­
comes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his
own fears, prejudices, and anxieties.
Other documents randomly have
different content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Following the
Sun-Flag: A Vain Pursuit Through Manchuria
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Following the Sun-Flag: A Vain Pursuit Through Manchuria

Author: Jr. John Fox

Release date: December 21, 2017 [eBook #56218]

Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Ernest Schaal and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOLLOWING THE

SUN-FLAG: A VAIN PURSUIT THROUGH MANCHURIA ***
FOLLOWING THE SUN-FLAG
 Copyright, 1905, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published April, 1905

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

To

"THE MEN OF MANY WARS"

WITH CONGRATULATIONS TO
THOSE ON WHOM FELL
THROUGH CHANCE OR PERSONAL EFFORT
A BETTER FORTUNE THAN WAS MINE
 CONTENTS
I. The Trail of the Saxon 1
II. Hardships of the Campaign 18
III. Lingering in Tokio 50
IV. Making for Manchuria 74
V. On the War-Dragon's Trail 102
VI. The White Slaves of Haicheng 128
VII. The Backward Trail of the Saxon 160
 INTRODUCTION
After a long still-hunt in Tokio, and a long pursuit through
Manchuria, following that Sun-Flag of Japan, I gave up the chase at
Liao-Yang.

Not being a military expert, my purpose was simply to see under

that flag the brown little "gun-man"—as he calls himself in his own
tongue—in camp and on the march, in trench and in open field, in
assault and in retreat; to tell tales of his heroism, chivalry, devotion,
sacrifice, incomparable patriotism; to see him fighting, wounded—
and, since such things in war must be—dying, dead. After seven
months my spoils of war were post-mortem battle-fields, wounded
convalescents in hospitals, deserted trenches, a few graves, and one
Russian prisoner in a red shirt.

Upon that unimportant personal disaster I can look back now with
no little amusement; and were I to re-write these articles, I should
doubtless temper both word and spirit here and there; but as my
feeling at the time was sincere, natural, and justified, as there is, I
believe, no over-statement of the facts that caused it, and as the
articles were written without malice or the least desire to "get
even"—I let them go, as written, into book form now.

No more enthusiastic pro-Japanese than I ever touched foot on

the shores of the little island, and no Japanese, however much he
might, if only for that reason, value my good opinion, can regret
more than I any change that took place within me when I came face
to face with a land and a people I had longed since childhood to see.

I am very sorry to have sounded the personal note so relentlessly

in this little book. That, too, was unavoidable, and will, I hope, be
pardoned.
 John Fox, Jr.

Big Stone Gap, Virginia.

FOLLOWING THE SUN-FLAG

FOLLOWING THE SUN-FLAG

THE TRAIL OF THE SAXON

An amphitheatre of feathery clouds ran half around the horizon
and close to the water's edge; midway and toward Russia rose a
great dark shadow through which the sun shone faintly. Such was
the celestial setting for the entrance of a certain ship some ten days
since at sunset into the harbor of Yokohama and the Land of the
Rising Sun; but no man was to guess from the strange pictures,
strange people, and jumbled mass of new ideas and impressions
waiting to make his brain dizzy on shore, that the big cloud aloft was
the symbol of actual war. No sign was to come, by night or by day,
from the tiled roofs, latticed windows, paper houses, the foreign
architectural monstrosities of wood and stone; the lights, lanterns,
shops—tiny and brilliantly lit; the innumerable rickshas, the swift
play under them of muscular bare brown legs which bore thin-
chested men who run open-mouthed and smoke cigarettes while
waiting a fare; the musical chorus of getas clicking on stone,
mounted by men bareheaded or in billycock hats; little women in
kimonos; ponies with big bellies, apex rumps, bushy forelocks and
mean eyes; rows of painted dolls caged behind barred windows and
under the glare of electric lights—expectant, waiting, patient—hour
by hour, night after night, no suggestion save perhaps in their idle
patience; coolies with push carts, staggering under heavy loads,
"cargadores" in straw hats and rain coats of rushes, looking for all
the world like walking little haycocks—no sign except in flags, the
red sunbursts of Japan, along now and then with the Stars and
Stripes—flags which, for all else one could know, might have been
hung out for a holiday.

For more than a month I had been on the trail of the Saxon, the
westward trail on which he set his feet more than a hundred years
ago, when he cut the apron-strings of Mother England, turned his
back on her, and, without knowing it, started back toward her the
other way round the world, to clasp hands, perhaps, again across
the Far East. Where he started, I started, too, from the top of the
Cumberland over which he first saw the Star of Empire beckoning
westward only. I went through a black tunnel straight under the trail
his moccasined feet wore over Cumberland Gap, and stopped, for a
moment, in a sleeper on the spot where he pitched his sunset camp
for the night; and the blood of his footprints still was there.

"This is a hell of a town," said the conductor cheerfully.

I waited for an explanation. It came.

"Why, I went to a nigger-minstrel show here the other night. A

mountaineer in the gallery shot a nigger and a white man dead in
the aisle, but the band struck up 'Dixie,' and the show never
stopped. But one man left the house and that was Bones. They
found him at the hotel, but he refused to go back. 'I can't be funny
in that place,' he said."

Now the curious thing is that each one of those three, the slayer
and the slain—the Saxon through the arrogance of race, the African
through the imitative faculty that has given him something of that
same arrogance toward the people of other lands—felt himself the
superior of any Oriental with a yellow skin. And now when I think of
the exquisite courtesy and ceremony and gentle politeness in this
land, I smile; then I think of the bearing of the man toward the
woman of this land, and the bearing of the man—even the
mountaineer—toward the woman in our own land, and the place the
woman holds in each—and the smile passes.

Along that old wilderness trail I went across the Ohio, through
prairie lands, across the rich fields of Iowa, the plains of Nebraska,
over the Rockies, and down into the great deserts that stretch to the
Sierras. Along went others who were concerned in that trail: three
Japanese students hurrying home from England, France, and
Germany, bits of that network of eager investigation that Japan has
spread over the globe—quiet, unobtrusive little fellows who rushed
for papers at every station to see news of the war; three Americans
on the way to the Philippines for the Government; an English Major
of Infantry and an English Captain of Cavalry and a pretty English
girl; and two who in that trail had no interest—two newspaper men
from France. I have been told that the only two seven-masted
vessels in the world collided one night in mid-ocean. Well, these
sons of France—the only ones on their mission, perhaps, in broad
America—collided not only on the same train, the same sleeper, and
the same section, I was told, but both were gazetted for the same
lower berth. Each asserted his claim with a politeness that became
gesticulatory and vociferous. Conductor, brakeman, and porter came
to the scene of action. Nobody could settle the dispute, so the
correspondents exchanged cards, claimed Gallic satisfaction
mutually, and requested the conductor to stop the train and let them
get off and fight. The conductor explained that, much as he
personally would like to see the scrap, the law of the land and the
speed of the Overland Limited made tarrying impossible. Without
rapiers I have often wondered how those two gentlemen of France
would have drawn each other's blood. Each still refused to take the
upper berth, but next day they were friends, and came over sea
practically arm and arm on shipboard, and arm and arm they
practically are in Japan to-day.

Through the stamping grounds of Wister's "Virginian" and other

men of fact and fiction in the West, the trail led—through barren
wastes with nothing alive in sight except an occasional flock of gray,
starved sheep with a lonely herder and his sheep-dog watching us
pass, while a blue-eyed frontiersman gave me more reasons for race
arrogance with his tales of Western ethics in the old days: How men
trusted each other and were not deceived in friendship and in trade;
how they sacrificed themselves for each other without regret, and no
wish for reward, and honored and protected women always.

Then forty miles of snowsheds over the Sierras, and the trail
dropped sheer into the dewy green of flowers, gardens, and fruit-
tree blossoms, where the grass was lush, cattle and sheep were fat,
and the fields looked like rich orchards—to end in the last camp of
the Saxon, San Francisco—where the heathen Chinee walks the
streets, where Robert Louis Stevenson's bronze galley has
motionless sails set to the winds that blow through a little park,
where Bret Harte's memory is soon to be honored in a similar way,
and where a man claimed that the civilization of the trail had leaped
in one bound from Chicago to the Pacific Coast. And I wondered
what the intermediate Saxons, over whose heads that leap was
made, would have to say in answer.

He had sailed one wide ocean—this Saxon—the other and wider

one was by comparison a child's play on a mill-pond with a boat of
his own making, and over it I followed him on.
 On the dock two days later I saw my first crowd of Japanese, in
Saxon clothes, waving flags, and giving Saxon yells to their
countrymen who were going home to fight. After that, but for an
occasional march of those same countrymen on the steerage deck to
the measure of a war-song, no more tidings, or rumors or
suggestions of war.

Seven days later, long, slowly rising slopes of mountains veiled in

mist came in view, and we saw waves of many colors washing the
feet of newest America, where the Saxon has pitched his latest but
not his most Eastern—as I must say now—camp; and where he is
patching a human crazy quilt of skins from China, Japan, Portugal,
America, England, Africa. The patching of it goes swiftly, but there
will be one hole in the quilt that will never be filled again on this
earth, for the Hawaiian is going—as he himself says, he is "pau,"
which in English means finished, done for, doomed. Now girls who
are three-quarters Saxon dance the hula-hula for tourists, and but
for a movement of their feet, it is the dance of the East wretchedly
and vulgarly done, and the spectator would wipe away, if he could,
every memory but the wailing song of the woman with the guitar—a
song which to my ear had no more connection with the dance than a
cradle song could have with a bacchanalian orgy.

At a big white hotel that night hundreds of people sat in a

brilliantly lighted open-air garden with a stone floor and stone
balustrade, and heard an Hawaiian band of many nationalities play
the tunes of all nations, and two women give vent to that adaptation
of the Methodist hymn that passes for an Hawaiian song.

Every possible human mixture of blood I had seen that day, I

fancied, but of the morals that caused the mixture I will not speak,
for the looseness of them is climatic and easily explained. I am told
that after five or six years the molecules even in the granite of the
New England character begin to get restless. Still there seems to be
hope on the horizon.
 At midnight a bibulous gentleman descended from a hack in front
of the hotel.

"Roderick Random," he said to his Portuguese driver, "this is a

bum-m town," spelling the word out thickly. Roderick smiled with
polite acquiescence. The bibulous gentleman spoke likewise to the
watchman at the door.

"Quite right, sir," said the watchman.

The elevator got the same blighting criticism from the visitor,
whose good-night to the clerk at the desk still was:

"This is a bum-m town."

The clerk, too, agreed, and the man turned away in disgust.

"I can't get an argument out of anybody on that point," he said—

all of which would seem to cast some doubt on the public late-at-
night flaunting of vice in Honolulu.

Two pictures only I carried away of the many I hoped to see—the

Hawaiian swimmers, bronzed and perfect as statues, who floated out
to meet us and dive for coins, and a crowd of little yellow fellows,
each on the swaying branch of the monkey-pod tree, black hair
shaking in the wind, white teeth flashing, faces merry, and mouths
stretched wide with song.

Thence eleven long, long days to that sunset entrance into the
Land of the Rising Sun—where Perry came to throw open to the
world the long-shut sea portals of Japan.

The Japanese way of revealing heart-beats is not the way of the

Occidental world, and seeing no signs of war, this correspondent, at
least, straightway forgot the mission on which he had come, and
straightway was turned into an eager student of a people and a land
which since childhood he had yearned to see.
 On a certain bluff sits a certain tea-house—you can see it from
the deck of the ship. It is the tea-house of One Hundred and One
Steps, and the mistress of it is O-kin-san, daughter of the man who
was mayor when Perry opened the sea portals at the mouth of the
cannon, whose guest Perry was, and whose friend.

O-kin-san's people lost their money once, and she opened the
tea-house, as the American girl under similar circumstances would
have taken to the typewriter and the stenographer's pen. The house
has a year of life for almost every one of the steps that mount to it,
which is ancient life for Japan, where fires make an infant life of
three years for the average Japanese home. The tea-girls are O-kin-
san's own kin. Everything under her roof is blameless, and the
women of any home in any land can be taken there fearlessly.

An American enthusiast—a voluntary exile, whom I met later—

told me that O-kin-san's Japanese was as good as could be found in
the empire; that her husband was one of the best-educated men he
had ever known, and had been a great help and inspiration to
Lafcadio Hearn. There were all the pretty courtesies, the pretty
ceremonies, and the gentle kindness of which the world has read.

After tea and sake and little Japanese cakes and peanuts, thence
straightway to Tokio, whence the soldiers went to the front and the
unknown correspondent was going, at that time, to an unknown
destination in an unknown time. It is an hour between little patches
of half-drowned rice bulbs, cottages thatched with rice straw, with
green things growing on the roof, and little gardens laid out with an
art minute and exquisite, blossoming trees of wild cherry, that
beloved symbol of Japanese bravery because it dares to spread its
petals under falling snow, dashed here and there with the red
camellia that is unlucky because it drops its blossom whole and
suggests the time when the Japanese head might fall for a slight
offence; between little hills overspread with pine trees, and little
leafless saplings that help so much to give the delicate, airy quality
that characterizes the landscape of Japan. At every station was a
hurrying throng of men, women, and children who clicked the stone
pavements on xylophones with a music that some writer with the
tympanum of a blacksmith characterized as a clatter. These getas
are often selected, I am told, to suit the individual ear.

At Tokio outward evidences of war were as meagre as ever. But to

that lack, the answer is, "It is not the Japanese custom." I am told
that the night war was declared the Japanese went to bed, but
about every bulletin board there is now always an eager crowd of
watchers. The shout of "Nippon banzai!" from the foreigner, which
means "Good luck to Japan," always gets a grateful response from
the child in the street, the coolie with his ricksha, policeman on his
beat, or the Japanese gentleman in his carriage.

And then the stories I heard of the devotion and sacrifice of the
people who are left at home! The women let their hair go undressed
once a month that they may contribute each month the price of the
dressing—five sen. A gentleman discovered that every servant in his
household, from butler down, was contributing a certain amount of
his wages each month, and in consequence offered to raise wages
just the amount each servant was giving away. The answer was:

"Sir, we cannot allow that; it is an honor for us to give, and it

would be you who would be doing our duty for us to Japan."

A Japanese lady apologized profusely for being late at dinner. She

had been to the station to see her son off for the front, where
already were three of her sons.

Said another straightway:

"How fortunate to be able to give four sons to Japan!"

In a tea-house I saw an old woman with blackened teeth, a

servant, who bore herself proudly, and who, too, was honored
because she had sent four sons to the Yalu. Hundreds and
thousands of families are denying themselves one meal a day that
they may give more to their country. And one rich merchant, who
has already given 100,000 yen, has himself cut off one meal, and
declares that he will if necessary live on one the rest of his life for
the sake of Japan.

There is a war play on the boards of one theatre. The heroine, a

wife, says that her unborn child in a crisis like this must be a man-
child, and that he shall be reared a soldier. To provide means, she
will herself, if necessary, go to the yoshiwara.

On every gateway is posted a red slab where a man has gone to

the war, marked "Gone to the front"—to be supplanted with a black
one—"Bravery forever"—should he be brought home dead. And
when he is brought home dead his body is received at the station by
his kin with proud faces and no tears. The Roman mother has come
back to earth again, and it is the Japanese mother who makes Japan
the high priestess of patriotism among the nations of the world. In
that patriotism are the passionate fealty of the subject to his king,
the love of a republic for its flag, and straightway the stranger feels
that were the Mikado no more and Japan a republic to-morrow, this
war would go on just as it would had the Japanese only this Mikado
and no land that he could call his own. The soldier at the front or on
the seas will give no better account of himself than the man,
woman, or child who is left at home, and a national spirit like this is
too beautiful to be lost.

Here forks the trail of the Saxon. One branch goes straight to the
Philippines. The other splits here into a thousand tiny paths—where
railway coach has supplanted the palanquin, battle-ship the war-
junk, electricity the pictured lantern; where factory chimneys smoke
and the Japanese seems prouder of his commerce than of his art
and his exquisite manners; where the boycott has started, and even
the word strike—"strikey, strikey" it sounds—has become the refrain
of a song. How shallow, after all, the tiny paths are, no man may
know; for who can penetrate the mystery of Japanese life and
character—a mystery that has been deepening for a thousand years.
Here is the chief lodge of the Order of Sealed Lips the world over,
and every man, woman, and child in the empire seems born a life-
member. It may be Japan who will clasp the hands of the Saxon
across this Far East. And yet who knows? Were Mother Nature to
found a national museum of the curiosities in plant and tree that
humanity has wrested from her, she would give the star-chamber to
Japan. This is due, maybe, to the Japanese love of plant and tree
and the limitations of space that forbid to both full height. Give the
little island room, and the dwarf pine and fruit-tree may become in
time, perhaps, as great a curiosity here as elsewhere in the world.
What will she do—when she gets the room? The Saxon hands may
never meet. Japan Saxonized may, in turn, Saxonize China and
throw the tide that has moved east and west, some day, west and
east again.
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