176 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



loveliness that is close to tears, like all things per- 

 fect. It will not do to say there is no paradox here 

 in this race, nor that this race alone has accepted 

 the arbitrament of war. It is not true. Locking 

 beyond the present struggle, as I can look beyond 

 the present forest about me, in the ancient stumps 

 and mold, or the new seedlings pushing up, I see 

 beauty and the love of beauty everywhere, and 

 foul cruelty beside it, of different kinds and different 

 degrees, but cruelty none the less. Just now a 

 hermit-thrush winged without a sound to a dead 

 limb not ten feet away from me. I turned my 

 head, and the movement caught his eye. With a 

 startled flutter, he flew swiftly and silently away 

 again, he, the loveliest of earthly singers, who could 

 not abide my presence ! You may smile if you like, 

 but I felt bitterly ashamed. 



I have just been reading of the rice riots in Japan, 

 for example, reading back in my library while sit- 

 ting beneath a print by Hiroshige. I read that 

 these riots are caused by the fact that a few men in 

 Japan, "imitating western capitalism at its most 

 ruthless," have made millions in the past three 

 years, while the wages of the laborers have been 

 kept at the old level, in spite of rising prices. That 

 is Japan, land of exquisite gardens, of color prints 

 never equaled elsewhere, of sensitiveness to flower 

 and landscape charm, to the most delicate subtle- 

 ties of line and color. Yet has Japan apparently 

 countenanced the ugliest effects of industrial des- 

 potism. The explanation that such is their form 

 of government and tradition cannot satisfy me. 

 Forms of government and traditions are what the 



