# Japan: Its History, Arts, and Literature/Volume 1/Chapter 1

JAPAN
ITS HISTORY ARTS AND LITERATURE
Chapter I
PRESENT JAPAN
Japan, since the resumption of her intercourse with Western nations forty years ago, has attracted much attention and inspired an extraordinarily large number of book-makers to discuss her beauties and her quaintnesses. Not one of these many authors has been wholly condemnatory. Most of them found something to admire in the manners and customs of her people, and all were charmed by her art and her scenery. Certainly, in the matters of seascape and landscape, Nature has been profusely kind to the Isles of Nippon. They rise out of the sea with so many graces of form, and lie bathed in an atmosphere of such sparkling softness, that it is easy to sympathise with the legend ascribing their origin to crystals dropped from the point of the Creator's spear. That they fell from some heaven of generous gods is a theory more consonant with their ​aspect, than the sober fact that they form part of a great ring welded by volcanic energy in the Pacific Ocean, and that still, from time to time, they shudder with uneasy memories of the fiery forces that begot them.
Eastern Asia thrusts two long slender arms into far oriental waters: Kamtchatka in the north, Malacca in the south; and between these lies a giant girdle of islands, holding in its embrace Siam, Cochin China, the Middle Kingdom, Korea, and the eastern end of the Great White Czar's dominions, thus extending from latitude 50° north to the equator. When Commodore Perry anchored at Uraga, in 1854, the empire of Japan stretched along two-fifths of this girdle. Beginning on the south, at Cape Sata, the lowest point of the Island of Nine Provinces (Kiushu), it ended, on the north, with a disputed fragment of Saghalien, and an unsettled number of the attenuated filament of islets called the Kuriles. Since then, the empire has been pushed ten degrees southward. Now, including the Riukiu (Loochoo) Islands and Formosa, it constitutes three-fifths of the girdle—a distance of two thousand miles—and extends over thirty degrees of latitude and thirty-five of longitude. Its expansion has followed the law of geographical affinities—temporarily transgressed in the case of the United States only, and ultimately verified by their history also:—southward the star of empire has taken its way. One loss of territory ​was suffered by Japan in that interval, perhaps by way of permanent punishment for standing so long aloof from the outer world: she had to surrender to Russia the island of Saghalien,—Karafuto, in her own nomenclature. But that exception tends only to emphasise the general rule of her expansion. First, she took steps to assure her possession of the Bonin group of islands—Ogasawara-jima, as she calls them—which, though discovered by her mariners two hundred years previously, were not included in her sphere of active occupation until 1871. Next she annexed the Riukiu archipelago, known to Western folks as the Loochoos, which form a series of stepping-stones between her shores and Formosa. They were claimed by China as an integral part of her empire, and the incidents of their acquisition by Japan almost involved the latter in a war with her colossal neighbour, at that time (1874) believed to be a Power of immense military resources. But Japan thought that she had a title to the islands, and she asserted it with courageous tenacity. The war then averted with difficulty, broke out twenty years later, and ended in a complete victory for Japan, one of the fruits of her success being that she added Formosa and the Pescadores to her dominions, which thus consist now of five large islands and a multitude of islets, the latter scattered along her coasts or grouped into four clusters,—the Kuriles (Chinshima) on the north; the Bonins (Ogasawara-​jima) on the east; the Loochoo (Riukiu or Okinawa) on the south; and the Pescadores, off the southwest coast of Formosa.
Territorial expansion has therefore been a feature of Japan's début upon the world's stage. Growth has marked the opening of her new career. The fact takes its place properly at the head of her modern records, for it constitutes a convincing proof that the diet of Western civilisation has brought to her an access of vigour, instead of overtaxing her digestion, as was generally feared at first.
To speak of a country as making its début upon the world's stage, is to suggest the idea of youth. But the age of the Japanese nation, measured by the mere lapse of centuries, is very mature. They themselves claim to have been an organised State for twenty-six hundred years, and there is no valid reason to deny at least the proximate accuracy of their estimate. It is a great age, yet insignificant compared with that of the neighbouring empire, China, which can count fully the double of Japan's tale of years. Both are ancient from an Occidental point of view, and perhaps because their fellowship with the West has been so short in comparison with the long succession of cycles covered by their records, it has become a habit to bracket them together as simultaneously introduced to the circle of civilised States. There is, however, a radical ​difference between the two countries. China stands, in the Far East, an imposing figure with her gigantic expanse of territory, her immense population, and her vast wealth of undeveloped resources. Such elements seem capable of being moulded into a world-moving force, and their potentialities have even appalled some leaders of European thought. But if history teaches anything it teaches that there is only one grand climacteric in the career of a nation. Beyond the summit descent is inevitable. The continuity of the downward grade is never broken by a second eminence. As it fares with a man or with a tree, so it fares with a nation's growth or decay. China long ago reached the zenith of her greatness, and has been sinking steadily to lower levels ever since. She was never an isolated State, husbanding her resources in seclusion and waiting to be galvanised into new life by contact with rival countries. Her very name, the "Middle Kingdom," indicates the relation in which she stood to the rest of the world. Whatever other States had to give, she received as a tribute to her own ineffable superiority, not as an incentive to emulation and exertion. That frame of mind became at last an instinct. It destroyed her appetite for assimilation and condemned her to succumb to any civilisation she could not despise. Japan's case has been dissimilar from point to point. Her whole career has been a continuous effort of assimilation; her invariable attitude, that of ​modest studentship. One advantage only she claimed over other States. It was the divine origin of her rulers and the consequent guardianship extended to her by the gods. But her deities were not supposed to contribute anything to her material civilisation. Their most beneficent function was tutelary. Hence her people never classed themselves above other nations in a progressive sense. They were always perfectly ready to accept and adopt every good thing that a foreign country had to offer, whether of philosophy, of art, of technique, of administration, or of legislation. That is a fact which stands out in doubly leaded capitals on the pages of Japan's story. From the very earliest hours of her national career the stranger was welcomed within her gates. Whoever brought to her any product of foreign learning, genius, or industry, whether from China, from Korea, or from the South Seas, was received with acclaim, and not merely granted a domicile, but also admitted to many of the most honourable offices the State had to bestow, and to the highest ranks of the social organisation. Many of her noble families trace their origin to emigrants from the Asiatic continent; many of her artists and men of letters are proud to show a strain of Chinese or Korean blood in their lineage.
There was, indeed, a long break in the continuity of that liberal attitude, a break of more than two hundred years. From the early part of the seventeenth century to the middle of the ​nineteenth, Japan led an almost hermit existence. Of her own choice she closed her doors to all the nations of the Occident except the Dutch, and with them, too, her intercourse ultimately became an affair of haughty tolerance on one side and narrow privileges on the other. But if the world learned to regard her in those days as a semi-savage recluse, that was simply the world's misconception. Were the sentiments which, at the close of the nineteenth century, impel the United States and Australia to bar out the Chinese, and induce Russia and Germany to ostracise the Jews,—were those sentiments multiplied by factors of political apprehension and religious intolerance, they would still fall short of the feelings that Japan learned to cultivate towards Occidentals at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. Opening her ports to their traders more freely than any other contemporaneous nation would have done, she found them rapidly denude her of her gold and silver. Showing towards the preaching and propagandism of their religion an attitude of tolerance absolutely without precedent in mediæval days, she discovered that the alien creed became a political weapon pointed at the heart of her own national integrity and independence. Her instincts had prompted her to be liberal and receptive; her experience had compelled her to be conservative and repellent. We who see things assume their due proportions in the long vista of the past, know that ​a more patient trial would have dispelled her suspicions, and that instead of closing her gates against the world for the sake of Roman Catholicism two hundred and fifty years ago, she might safely have kept them open in its despite, and commenced then the career of progress which promises to carry her so far to-day. But to adopt such a course in the face of such dissuasive experiences, she must have been as much in advance of her time as she ultimately fell behind it by choosing a policy of isolation. No nation with which history makes us acquainted would have acted a part different from the one she selected, and if she clung to her seclusion long enough to be counted a benighted bigot, it was largely because a geographical accident made it easy for her, on the one hand, to live apart, and kept her, on the other, beyond the effective range of influences which would certainly have drawn her out of her hermitage. Besides, on the Occident only, or, to narrow the facts to their exact limits, on the Roman Catholic countries of the Occident only, did she turn her back between 1630 and 1857. The Dutch had commercial access to her dominions, and the Chinese might come and go at will. Grant that the Hollanders were subjected to humiliating restrictions, and grant also that there was no reciprocity of intercourse with China, since Japanese subjects might not cross to the neighbouring empire; yet it must still be conceded that these ultimate vetoes were dictated ​by extraneous causes, whereas the previous sanctions reflected Japan's natural disposition. She had always been liberal by instinct, though her mood had sometimes become conservative by education.
If these facts are recognised, her modern career becomes much more intelligible. Many onlookers have wondered that a nation should be able to spring suddenly out of an isolation which three centuries of observance had crystallised into a creed, and should suddenly embrace an alien civilisation not merely with avidity, but also with aptitude such as only a thoroughly liberal mood could beget. The truth is that these singular feats indicated, not a change of nature, but the re-assertion of an inborn disposition. For eighteen centuries she had been freely borrowing and assimilating everything that her Oriental neighbours had to offer, and when, in the middle of the nineteenth, she discovered that the Occident was incomparably a greater teacher, she merely obeyed her immemorial tendency of entering the newly opened school. But, it may be urged, though that accounts for her liberalism, it does not explain her receptivity. It tells us why she did not cling to her temporary conservatism, but it does not tell us why her progress became so rapid as to surprise the world. When an American squadron arrived to break down her isolation, she did not possess even the beginnings of a national fleet or a national army; of an ocean-going mercantile marine; of ​a telegraphic or postal system; of a newspaper press; of enlightened codes, of a trained judiciary, or of properly organised tribunals of justice; she knew nothing of Occidental sciences and philosophies; was a complete stranger to international law and to the usages of diplomacy; had no conception of parliamentary institutions or popular representation, and was divided into a number of feudal principalities, each virtually independent of the other, and all alike untutored in the spirit of nationality or imperialism. In thirty years these conditions were absolutely metamorphosed. Feudalism had been abolished; the whole country united under one administration; the polity of the State placed on a constitutional basis; the people admitted to a share in the government under representative institutions; an absorbing sentiment of patriotism substituted for the narrow local loyalties of rival fiefs; the country intersected with telegraphs and railways, and its remotest districts brought within the circuit of an excellent postal system; the flag of the nation carried to distant countries by a large mercantile marine; a powerful fleet organised, manned by expert seamen, and proved to be as capable of fighting scientifically as of navigating the high seas with marked immunity from mishap; the method of conscription applied to raising a large military force, provided with the best modern weapons and trained according to Western tactics; the laws recast on the most advanced principles ​of Occidental jurisprudence and embodied in exhaustive codes; provision made for the administration of justice by well-equipped tribunals and an educated judiciary; an extensive system of national education inaugurated, with universities turning out students capable of original research in the sciences and philosophies of the West; the State represented at foreign courts by competent diplomatists; the people supplied with an ample number of journals and periodicals; the foundations of a great manufacturing career laid, and the respect of foreign Powers unreservedly won. Such a record may well excite wonder.
But before crediting the Japanese with exceptional qualities for the sake of their modern progress, we must agree upon a standard of comparison, and that is difficult, since the history of nations furnishes only one case approximately parallel to that of Japan. Were any liberal-minded Western people brought suddenly into contact with a civilisation immensely higher than its own, a civilisation presenting material advantages and attractions that the least intelligent must appreciate, who can venture to gauge the impulse of adoption or the speed of assimilation that such a people would develop? Suppose that to the eyes of the English of a hundred years ago there had been abruptly exposed a stage whereon railways ran, steamboats plied, telegraphs flashed their messages to limitless distances, telephones made whispers audible across continents, torpe​does, breech-loaders, machine guns, and iron-clads revolutionised warfare, carriages were propelled by electricity, and men travelled at the rate of thirty miles an hour on machines which could not stand upright at rest,—would not the display have revolutionised England? Yet this catalogue of wonders has to be largely extended before it covers the exhibition by which Japan was dazzled forty years ago. No wonder that she stretched out eager hands to grasp such an array of novelties.
If that were all she had done, it might not be fair to say that any intelligent people would have acted with less vigour under similar circumstances. But Japan did not confine herself to adopting the externals of Western civilisation. She became an eager pupil of its scientific, political, moral, philosophic, and legislative systems also. She took the spirit as well as the letter, and by so doing differentiated herself effectively from Oriental States. It has been objected that this wholesale receptivity was limited to a few leaders of thought,—to the literati and the military patricians whose will had always been law to the commoners. Certainly that is true as to the initiative. But it is unimaginable that such sweeping changes could have been effected in a quiet and orderly manner had not the hearts of the people been with the reformers. In Japan no railways were torn up, no machines wrecked, no lines of telegraph demolished by labourers ​who feared for their own employment or fanatics who saw their superstitions slighted. Rapid as was the pace set by the leaders of progress, the masses did not hang back. That tribute at least must be paid to the nation's intelligent liberality by any honest writer of its modern history. We may deny that other peoples might not have done as well, but we can scarcely affirm that any would have done better. The only known instance of parallel opportunity was China, and to China, after a hundred years of scrutiny, the advantages of Occidental civilisation are still invisible.
Another point to be noted in analysing the causes of Japan's success is that many phases of her own civilisation were superior to the civilisation of the West when she began to assimilate the better parts of the latter. She did not bring to the examination of Occidental systems and their products a mind wholly untrained to distinguish the good from the bad. In her social conventionalisms, in her refinements of life, in her altruistic ethics, in many of her canons of domestic conduct, in her codes of polite etiquette, in her applications of art, she could have given to Europe lessons as useful as those she had to learn from it. That she should see the right quickly might have been anticipated. Then there was her ambition, an absorbing sentiment. Almost from the first moment when she looked out on the world which had so long been hidden ​from her, she detected the wide interval separating her material civilisation from that of the West. Thenceforth it became the constantly expressed aspiration of every educated Japanese that his country soon "get level" with Occidental nations in the race of progress. That wish was paramount from the very beginning. There was not the least attempt to throw any bridge of extenuation across the gulf of inferiority. The frankly recognised facts inspired an earnest resolve to alter them if possible, and as speedily as possible. How many Japanese students have overtaxed their powers of endurance under the goad of that aspiration, how many statesmen have made it the prime motive of their administration, no one can conceive who has not observed these people closely since they first stepped out of the shadow of isolation.
Strangers discussing the character of the Japanese have assigned to it an extraordinary element of patriotism, and inferred abnormal readiness to make sacrifices on the altar of love of country. There is no warrant for such a theory. The Japanese doubtless have their full share of patriotism, but they cannot claim an unexceptional measure of it. What is mistaken for an unusual abundance of the sentiment is simply its morbid activity, caused, on the one hand, by a genuine perception of the distance they have to traverse before they reach the elevation of prosperity and progress on which Occidental nations stand; on ​the other, by the treatment they have received at the hands of those nations. The most tolerant of Europeans has always regarded the Japanese, and let them see that he regarded them, merely as interesting children. Languidly curious at best about the uses to which they would put their imported toys, his curiosity was purely academical, and whenever circumstances required him to be practical, he laid aside all pretence of courtesy and let it be plainly seen that he counted himself master and intended to be so counted. If the archives of the Japanese Foreign Office were published without expurgation, their early pages would make a remarkable record. Diplomatic euphemisms are the last thing to be sought there. And in that respect they reflect the demeanour of the ordinary foreigner. When not a harsh critic, he was either contemptuously tolerant or loftily patronising. The Japanese chafed under that kind of treatment for many years, and they resent it still; for though a pleasant alteration has gradually been effected in the foreigner's methods, the memory of the evil time survives. Besides, they neither consider the change complete, nor regard its causes with unmixed satisfaction. It is not complete because the taint of Orientalism has not yet been removed from the nation, and the causes are unsatisfactory because they suggest a low estimate of Western morality.
No one who should tell the Japanese to-day that the consideration they have won from the ​West is due solely to their progress in peaceful arts would find serious listeners. They themselves held that belief as a working incentive twenty years ago, but experience has dissipated it, and they now know that the world never took any respectful notice of them until they showed themselves capable of winning battles. At first they imagined that they might efface the Oriental stigma by living up to civilised standards. But the success they had attained was scarcely perceptible when suddenly their victorious war with China seemed to win for them more esteem in half a year than their peaceful industry had won for them in half a century. The perception of that fact upset their estimate of the qualifications necessary for a place in "the foremost files of time," and had much to do with the desire they henceforth developed for expanded armaments. Their military and naval forces had been proved competent to beat China to her knees with the utmost ease, yet they proceeded at once to double their army. Onlookers watch these doings with interest and speculate whether Japan's financial resources can bear such a strain, but do not seem to consider seriously what it all signifies, or how Japan accounts to her own conscience for these extravagances. Yet the answer appears to lie not far from the surface. To reach it we must first recognise why she drew the sword against China in 1894,—not the approximate cause of the struggle, but its remote cause. The approximate ​cause is readily discernible. China's attitude towards Korea, her fitful interference in the little kingdom's affairs, her exercise of suzerain rights while uniformly disclaiming suzerain responsibilities, created a situation intolerable to Japan, who had concluded a treaty with Korea on the avowed basis of the latter's independence. A consenting party to that treaty, China nevertheless ignored it in practice, partly because she despised the Japanese and resented their apostasy from Oriental traditions, but chiefly because her ineffable faith in her own superiority to outside nations absolved her from any obligation to respect their conventions. Japan's material and political interests in Korea outweigh those of all other States put together. In asserting her commercial rights she could not possibly avoid collision with a Power behaving as China behaved. But there was another force pushing the two States into the arena: they had to do battle for the supremacy of the Far East. China, of course, did not regard the issue in that light. It was part of her immemorial faith in her own transcendence that the possibility of being challenged should never occur to her. But Japan's case was different. Her position might be compared to that of a lad who had to win a standing for himself in a new school by beating the head boy of his form. China was the head boy of the East-Asian form. Her huge dimensions, her vast resources, her apparently inexhaustible "staying power," entitled ​her to that position, and outside nations accorded it to her. To worst her meant to leap at one bound to the hegemony of the Far East. That was the quickest exit from the shadow of Orientalism, and Japan took it. This is not a suggestion that she forced a fight upon her neighbour merely for the purpose of establishing her own superiority. What it means is that the causes which led to the fight had their remote origin in the different attitudes of the two countries towards Western civilisation. Having cordially embraced that civilisation, Japan could not consent to be included in the contempt with which China regarded it; and having set out to climb to the level of Occidental nations, she had to begin by emerging from the ranks of Oriental nations.
This analysis, if we push it to its logical sequel, brings us into the presence of a startling conclusion. Japan has risen to the headship of the Far East. Is that the goal of her ambition? One of her favourite sayings is, "Better be the tail of an ox than the comb of a cock." She is now the comb of the Oriental cock. That is not enough: she wants to be the tail of the Occidental ox. How is it to be done? Evidently by following the route that has already led her so far. She cannot turn back. Her destiny forces her on, and there is no mistaking the sign-post set up by her recent experience. She has been taught that fighting capacity is the only sure passport to European esteem, and she has also ​been told again and again, is still perpetually told, that her victory over China proved nothing about her competence to stand in the lists of the West. She will complete the proof, or try to complete it. Nothing is more certain, nothing more apparent to all that have watched her closely. Perhaps she has not yet formulated the project to herself in explicit terms. But it has found a lodgment in her heart, and unconsciously she is moulding her actions in obedience to it.
These are the reasons that render Japan such an interesting figure. She rivets our attention, not by what she has done, however remarkable that may seem, but rather by what she must still try to do. She has undertaken to demonstrate that an Eastern nation can act a leading part on the same stage with Western peoples, using the same properties and obeying the same directions. It is the first essay of the kind in history, and it will not be consummated without some stirring episodes.
From a physical point of view the Japanese race seems ill fitted for the competition upon which it has entered and for the grim struggle that lies before it. An army of Japanese is to an army of Europeans in respect of stature what an army of females in the Occident would be to an army of males. But the same might be said of the Sepoys or the Ghoorkas; yet no English general, estimating the results of a colli​sion between Indian troops and Europeans, would think of counting the inches of the Ghoorka or the Sepoy. The Japanese, indeed, resemble the Ghoorkas very closely. There is the same lightness of movement, the same admirable balance of muscle and bone, the same symmetry of form and power of endurance. A very marked advantage in height is on the side of the Chinaman; so marked that from ancient times he has been accustomed to call the Japanese "pygmies." Nevertheless, in the war of 1894–95 the Chinese went down helplessly before the Japanese wherever the two met. The same difference of bulk exists in favour of the Korean, yet an even greater difference of fighting capacity has been practically established in favour of the Japanese. There is thus no reason to argue any physical disability on the part of the Japanese to take a successful part in a warlike struggle; and in the Chili campaign of 1900, when they marched in the van of Europe and America to the relief of Peking, they showed themselves at least as efficient as the soldiers of any other nationality. They have two very marked advantages: the simplicity of their diet, which immensely facilitates commissariat arrangements; and the excellence of their officers. It was owing in great part to the former fact that their war with China in 1894–95 cost them only twenty million pounds sterling. They conducted seven campaigns over-sea, involving a force of a hundred and twenty thousand men, and they ​employed a navy of twenty-eight ships which remained on active service for nine months.
It was the cheapest belligerent feat on record, and it established for the Japanese the possession of a faculty which had been habitually denied to them by foreign critics, the faculty of organisation. For the purposes of that war their organisation was really admirable. Such an effort might have been expected to tax their strength to the utmost, to interrupt the course of every-day business, and to throw their domestic affairs into more or less confusion. It did nothing of the kind. The home life of the people went on placidly and regularly, as though not a ship or a soldier had been sent to meet a foreign enemy. Sometimes a little village community left their farm labours to cheer a detachment of troops en route for Manchuria or Korea, and sometimes the arrival of a batch of wounded Chinese created a passing thrill of excitement. But, for the rest, the great fighting machine worked with absolute silence and smoothness. The troops, carried over specially constructed railways outside the boundaries of the chief cities, or marched quietly at night through their streets, seldom attracted public attention; the fleet of fifty steam transports was descried once or twice gliding through the narrow strait that gives upon the China Sea, but never came into the vista of national observation; the newspapers reported yesterday that an army corps of twenty thousand men had embarked ​for Liaotung, to-day that an equal force had landed in Shantung, but if these troops had sprung, fully equipped, from the sea at the place of their exit or destination, the country could not have known less of their comings and goings. There were no accidents, no miscarriages, no apparent errors of calculation or failures of foresight. One may urge, indeed, that neither was there any originality, since European modes were followed. But it is certain that before the war no foreign critic would have credited the Japanese with capacity to conduct such operations. He would have denied their power of organisation, and he is therefore constrained to attach as much value to the positive evidence of success as he would have inferred from the negative testimony of failure.
In truth this favourite theory about a want of organising faculty among the Japanese, like that other theory about their want of originality, rests on pure hypothesis aided by ignorance of history. To ascribe lack of originality to a nation which has given the world a new grammar of decorative art is as consistent with facts as to allege absence of organising ability among a people who have produced a Yoritomo, a Hideyoshi, and an Ieyasu. The two criticisms may be definitely dismissed.
And the officers that commanded in the field showed themselves as able as those that planned in the Cabinet. They shared every hardship that their men endured, ate the same food, were content with the same shelter, and took the larger ​share of danger. The Japanese officer has this fine quality, that to a hereditary love of fighting he adds the zeal of a professional soldier. His heart is in his calling. He loves his uniform, has no aim in life higher than the discharge of his duty, and possesses the capacity for obedience which lies at the root of power to command.
There is nothing decrepit about such a nation. It is old in years, but the infused blood of Western civilisation has renewed its youth. The first result of its début on the world's stage has therefore been territorial expansion, a fact sufficiently significant to stand at the head of these pages.
Japan would go far if she were not crippled by a heavy handicap, want of money. She has been called the "England of the East;" but she differs radically from England in this vital respect that whereas Imperial England has only to follow whither the capital of commercial and industrial England overflows, industrial and commercial Japan is quite unable to utilise the opportunities which Imperial Japan creates. In China and Korea, Japanese diplomacy or Japanese armed strength has won valuable privileges and opened wide fields, but they remain to this day almost entirely unfruitful. Even in the home country the development of many promising enterprises is delayed for lack of funds. Everything is on a petty scale. There is not throughout the length and breadth of the land a factory or a tradal organisation that would be counted of even mediocre importance ​in America or England. Seventy per cent of the nation's school-age children receive instruction, yet the total sum annually expended on this education is not twice the yearly income of one of the great colleges of the United States. The aggregate capital invested in all the banks, industrial, commercial, insurance, shipping, and agricultural companies throughout the empire is less than the fortune of a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt. Many widow's mites are given to relieve distress, but the whole of the charitable and philanthropic donations made by private individuals during the thirty-two years of the Meiji era would look small by the side of a respectable Mansion House fund. So lilliputian are the dimensions of the market that a single speculation disturbs it. Consols are quoted, say at 95, but a purchase or sale of half a million dollars' worth would drive them up to 96 or more. The spirit of enterprise, stunted by this atmosphere of impecuniosity at home, naturally makes no excursions abroad. Railways wait in vain to be built by Japanese in Korea, new settlements to be colonised in China, large resources to be exploited in Formosa.
There remains, too, a disposition inherited from feudal times, a tendency to rely on official initiative and to shrink from every venture unaided by the State. Nearly all the material progress of the Meiji era has been led by the Government. Matters have greatly mended in that respect, but the writings of the vernacular ​journals, with few exceptions, still show that instead of making opportunities for themselves, the people look to have them made for them officially. If they had stores of spare capital seeking investment, they would act a very different part on the neighbouring continent. But chill poverty freezes the current of their activity, and while they have an abundance of the imperial instinct, they lack the means of making it potential. That difficulty must cripple Japan seriously. A poor nation has never been great. She may succeed in filling her purse before the time comes to open it, but no resources now in sight definitely promise such a result. All that can be said of her is that she has boundless ambition; that she has established her ability to reach great ends with small means, and that she will certainly bid for a far higher place than she has yet attained.
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