RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
capacity of a war secretary, to witness the evolutions of a crack Japanese regiment, of 3,000 troops ready for the field massed on a single great parade ground.
The Japanese Minister of War, General Terauchi, was a soldier—which seems fitting, and which is usual in most countries I believe—and he assumed at once, in common with all the other Army officers whom he encountered, that Mr. Taft was a soldier, too. This has nothing to do with immediate story, but I remember it as one of the most amusing circumstances of that visit to Japan. Whatever Mr. Taft may be he is not martial, but these Japanese warriors proceeded to credit him with all manner of special knowledge which he had never had an opportunity to acquire and to speak to him in technical terms which, it must be admitted, strained his ability for concealing his ignorance. He finally said that if anybody asked him again about the muzzle velocity of a Krag-Jorgensen, or any like question, he intended to reply: "Sh! It's a secret!"
General Kodama, who afterward made himself world-famous as Chief of Staff during the Russo-Japanese War, had been Military Governor of Formosa and he was especially interested in Mr. Taft because he conceived that in the Philippines we had a parallel for their Formosan problem. He grew quite confidential, telling Mr. Taft many things about the Japanese administration of Formosan affairs and drawing comparisons between his difficulties and those that we had encountered under similar circumstances. He ended by saying:
"We had to kill a good many thousands of those people before they would be good. But then, of course, you understand,—you know,—you know!"
This story could not have been told at that time because there were groups of active anti-Imperialists in the United States who would have pounced upon it as something to be made the most of as an argument for their cause, but in the
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