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"These lines are loved and memorized by many Japanese. The improvement of such conditions of want and misery may have lurked in the minds of these radicals. They must have thought that by overthrowing the present Cabinet they would be helping to bring forth a Cabinet genuinely patriotic and free from selfish interests.
"However it is no easy task to direct the affairs of a mighty modern nation. As your late President Theodore Roosevelt used to say. 'it is the batting average that counts.' This point has been lost sight of by the radical officers."
Significance. The great Japanese statesmen killed or attacked last week were all models of moderation, budget-balancing, diplomatic conciliation and PEACE. The significance of the fact that they were attacked is to be found in the exact opposites of all they stood for. The significance is WAR. Neither attacked nor threatened was any "strong" or so-called "Fascist" Japanese. Their names began to appear only when Tokyo's smartest correspondents started guessing who was going to be the next Premier.
Significantly the need for a "next Premier," which arose when Premier Okada was believed to be dead, survived his reappearance from among the scullery maids. The great Army, Navy and Air Force leaders, who frankly despise Japanese politicians and businessmen, assumed that a new Cabinet is indicated—with themselves more strongly represented than ever before. Everyone else assumed that a new Cabinet is indicated. Any notion that Premier Okada. having barely escaped assassination, should superintend the prosecution, conviction and execution of the clean young Boys was far from Japanese thoughts.
Adolf Hitler in Germany is turning back the centuries toward blood, Wotan, race. Japan has never really turned her centuries forward to 1936. In Russia the worried Bolsheviks consider themselves likely objects of Japanese and German pincers closing upon Russia in simultaneous war from East and West (TIME. Feb. 24). The prostrate Chinese as they scanned the news from Tokyo this week remained particularly prostrate, a comfortable posture in which they await Japanese bankruptcy, Japanese proletarian revolution, Japanese defeat by Russia or the decay of Japanese from temperamental instability in a few hundred or thousand years.