LORD NORTHCLIFFE has chosen the moment when the Prince of Wales is visiting Japan and English eyes are turned upon that country to draw attention to the subtle, ceaseless activity of the Japanese Military Party. For the present the Liberals are powerless against it. It dominates completely the Japanese Press, it controls a vast enterprise of propaganda through news agencies at home and abroad, through films and plays. Its aim is, by the annexation of Korea which it has already effected and by the annexation of Manchuria which it is stealthily contriving, so to envelop China as to control it, in the belief that whoever controls China will control the world. It hesitates as little as the militarist party in Germany to falsify news to its own advantage, and of this Lord Northcliffe gives a very striking instance. The Washington Conference has not diverted the Japanese Military Party from its aims, it has, perhaps, enabled it to work with greater ease and concealment; and the domestic difficulties of China, where the rival armies are approaching a conflict, play into the hands of the Japanese by offering a standing excuse for intervention which may be seized at the right time. Our own correspondence from Japan during the last year or two has justified us in calling attention more than once to the danger which Lord Northcliffe indicates. We fear that his argument been criticized for the suggestion that the Prussian spirit can exist in a nation so courteous and attractive. We do not say that it possesses the whole nation, as it possessed almost all Germany, Japanese Liberalism is stronger than German. But that the Japanese may become the Prussians of the Far East is obvious.

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