by any Asiatic people, whose want of maritime skill,
judging from the experience of all history, will
never enable them to equip a fleet equal to transport
an army adequate to so great an enterprise.
The Tartars, the only people of Asia who ever
made extensive distant conquests, made an unsuccessful
attempt on Japan in the year 1284, flushed
with their success in the conquest of China, and
with all the resources of that country at their command,
while the ports from which they sailed were
not above five or six days’ voyage distant. The European
race is the only one which can now effect
distant conquests, and the very circumstance, the
maritime voyage, which opposes an insuperable obstacle
to the conquests of an Asiatic people, gives
facility to theirs. Since the Japanese _ have shut
up their empire, that race has been gathering round
them. The Russians are, since then, colonized at
Kamschatka, within a month’s voyage. The British
empire has been established in Hindustan, pot
above six weeks’ sail from them. A colony of the
English has been founded in Australasia, destined
to be a mighty empire, and not a month distant
from Japan. Two great empires are established,
or establishing, by the European race in the New
World, the western shore of which cannot be above
a month’s voyage from Japan by the surest and easiest
navigation in the world. The danger is perhaps
least from the quarter where, at first view, it appears
most imminent, from the Russians. Their establishment
at Kamschatka is formed in a situation far removed
from the effective power of the empire, and in
a country by nature so sterile and inhospitable, that
the European race can never become in it populous
or powerful, nor can it ever therefore furnish the
means of fitting out a great armament adequate to
the conquest of Japan. The most imminent danger
to the independence of Japan is from the western
shore of America, either from the Anglo-Americans
when they shall have spread to that coast, and when
their settlements shall have become populous and
powerful in that quarter, or, in a less distant time,
perhaps, from the Spanish Americans of Chili, Peru
or Mexico. These may yet avenge the wrongs,
real or imaginary, which the Japanese did to their
ancestors and to their religion. A powerful and
ambitious people of Northern or Southern America
would easily fit out a fleet on the Columbia at A-
capulco, Lima, or Valparaiso, which, in a month’s
time, would invade Japan, unaware of what is
passing in the rest of the world, and wholly unprepared
to resist it. When the time comes that the
Spanish Americans navigate the seas of India in
numbers, they will probably not be without pretext.
If one of their vessels, for example, should happen
to be shipwrecked on the coast of Japan, it
is probable that, in obedience to the standing orders
of the empire, which are inviolate, the crew