GENERAL KUROPATKIN, former minister of war in Russia, has written to Herr M. Rensner, professor of international law of Berlin, a letter in which he declares that the psychology of the Japanese is so reverse from that of Americans that they are easily deceived. He writes, ''When a Japanese says to you he likes you and is your intimate friend, it is not true. Deal with a Japanese just the reverse to what he assures you.''
He declares that several years before the war broke out between Russia and Japan there was a hidden hostility toward the Russians that was very noticeable, and as time passed was intensified; and yet at that very time the Japanese government and newspapers began to announce that ''Russia was their best friend, and that there never could be any trouble between them.'' ''We believed those supposedly sincere assurances and suppressed all utterances in regard to the Japanese politics. But that was a great mistake and the cause of our failure. And yet the Japanese government and newspapers continued to be our greatest friends until the very moment the war was declared.'' He further says, ''Whoever thinks in America that a war between the United States and Japan is absurd is very much mistaken or stupid.''
General Arsenieyeff, who has just returned from an inspection tour along the Amur and Sungari rivers, according to a despatch from St. Petersburg, declares that where Japanese are being allowed to settle they are eating up the Russian villages like locusts. The general says that the Japanese can oust any European race by mere economic stress. One village which had forty Russian farms now has twenty-two Russian and thirty Japanese farms. ''If present conditions continue, she [Russia] will have to abandon the Pacific Coast entirely to the Japanese.''