110 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



powerfully affected the potentiality of Japan in the 

 world that in the brief period mentioned results 

 have been attained absolutely in the face of all 

 that was previously believed to be possible. 



Civilization has seen a people formerly negligible 

 and regarded as unfit for association with Western 

 nations attaining almost at a bound an efficiency 

 in the arts of peace and later in the stern stress of 

 war which has given them a place of equality as a 

 great power amongst the leading nations of civiliza- 

 tion. By collectively submitting themselves with 

 full intent to a new kind of social inheritance the 

 Japanese people attained in less than two genera- 

 tions to a position which it has taken the principal 

 Occidental nations centuries of stress to reach in 

 the ordinary process of development. 



The historian of the future, looking back, will 

 perceive that for three centuries there have been 

 no events in the world to compare in significance 

 and in the lessons which they bear for the future 

 with this sudden transformation of modern Japan 

 and modern Germany. A new science, a new order 

 of ideas, a new kind of knowledge of which the very 

 elements are still almost unknown has come within 

 the vision of civilization. 



Some years ago, when I published in Social 

 Evolution a destructive criticism of Galton's ex- 



