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mated would be more than sufficient by 1905–06 to pay off all the disbursements of the North China affair. I shall not go into further details, but add that both the State finances and the industrial and commercial future of Japan are such as would present an inviting feature for foreigners’ investments in any form, if their actual state is carefully studied without sensational and racial prejudices, so often observable in the arguments advanced by foreign critics.

As stated above, many of the undertakings started after the war were not honest concerns, and the stringency of 1900–01 meant nothing but that the weak and speculating enterprises were working out their own destruction. The nation at large learned a lesson from the crisis, that in all business undertakings only the honest and substantial concerns can survive the test of social and business morality, which never waives its strict requirements.