THE GREAT PACIFIC LABORATORY gy

out offending the world. I asked him what could be done about

it now. He said : " Mr. -----, I have no doubt that the little

chicken often thinks back to the egg—how warm and comfortable
it was ; but once pecked out, there is no egg to which he can go
back. We only go ahead now and hope for the best."

I asked him about the rumours of war between the United
States and Japan. I told him both navies seemed to have the
jitters but I couldn't see any prospects of war. He said : " Don't

be too sure of that, Mr.-----. Always remember that those whose

careers depend upon war always want war."
I asked him : " Do you mean the Navy, Your Excellency ? "
" Oh no, no, no," he said. " The Navy is all right; but the
Army knows very little about the world.53

THE GREAT PACIFIC LABORATORY

The Ambassador's Address at the Luncheon of the Pan-Pacific Association
and the Pan-Pacific Club in Commemoration of Balboa Day> Tokyo,
September 25, 1933

MR. CHAIRMAN, YOUR EXCELLENCIES, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,—
When we picture Balboa standing, over four hundred years ago,
on that mountain chain in Dari6n and gazing for the first time on
the broad expanse of the Pacific, we inevitably wonder whether he
was gifted with imaginative foresight and could visualize that this
great ocean would some day become not only a mighty commercial
clearing-house for the exchange of many of the world's essential
products, but that it would develop also into the greatest experimental
laboratory in history. For on the shores of that ocean a number
of great and smaller powers are working out their respective destinies
under radically different systems of government, the outcome of racial,
historical, or geographic factors or, in some cases, as the result of a
break with the past and the adoption of a new orientation.

Among other nations of the Pacific, Japan, with her vast back-
ground of Oriental culture combined with the energy and initiative
of a virile people, absorbed the civilization of the Occident, and yet
came through the process—a process of abnormal rapidity—strong
in her own personality and national character, in which centraliza-
tion of authority and the pre-eminence of the Throne are the out-
standing elements.

The British Commonwealth of Nations, which spreading round
the world keeps its far-flung units in vital intercourse by protected
maritime traffic and by periodical conferences that decide how they
can assist and guard one another's freedom and interests, owes its
strength to the elasticity and resiliency of the system.

The contribution of the United States is a federal organization
that permits of the freest intercourse between its component states,
4