The news & observer. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 1894-current, 1904-02-14


hitp the emperor-magician of Japan the
man of the hour in the far east today,
as he looks back to the time when he
came to power. AS long as Japan has a
place in the world his name must live on
the roll of the worlds great men.
1t was not given to many of the great
world-fgures who made history and
founded empires to sow the seed and
watch the harvest gathered in. England
toiled painfully through the centuries,
through war and revolution, now suffer-
ing long oppression, now beating down
its kings, out of the long night of feudal-
ism into the freedom which she has
spread throughout the earth. But to one
man in the world it has been given to
find nation bound and to set it free to
ascend a feudal throne and to base it
firmly upon the peoples will
Mutsuhito has brought Japan to Eu-
rope 1t is almost as if he had, by a
stroke of a magic wand, transformed the
England Of the conquerer into the Eng
land of today. Half a thousand years
seem to have slipped by forgotten in the
generation which Mutsuhito has reigned.
Time and history seem both to be play
ing tricks when we think of the rise of
japan. The things which should be cen
tur;es old are only thirty years, and al
most on the same page we find Prime
Ministers and feudal lords. There are
men, and men not very old, who remem-
Der when for an Engiishman to set foot
in Japan was a perilous thing, when
Japan was to Europe as a closed book
which none had dared to open. Then,
across the vast distance, came rumblings
OF storm, the dim message of a mighty
change, and Europe knew that Mutsu-
hito, young man in an old country, the
youngest, perhaps, of all the rulers in the
world, had broken down the power OF
centuries swept aside all but a thousand
years of custom, and laid the foundation
of new japan.
1t was the work, as it were, of night.
In a short war, the Shotgun, the dynasty
which had ruled Japan for seven hundred
years, was overthrown, and the dynasty
which through all the centuries had ruled
japan in name nav ruled in fact That
wes in 1868, when Mutsuhito was sixteen.
and it seems an incredible thing outside
a novel that a youth in his teens should
lead a kingdom out OF Egypt into the
promised land. Yet all that IS modern
and powerful in Japan has come into be-
ing since the emperor was sixteen, and
- in his short life is bound up all the
strange change which he's made Japan
the hope of the East today.
A MIGHTY SACRIFICE.
Even now there are times when Japan
looks rather like a picture in a fairy
book than a country on the map. At the
en;reror's garden party gray veterans
scrape up the soil where his chair rested
and carry it away, and il the emperor
had taken a piece of cake and left half
of it, no guest need think twice who
II.
price is born, he who presents the babe
to Mutsuhito must cover his mouth lest
he breathe by chance upon an emperor
OF Japan, and Alice in all her dream OF
wonderland saw nothing more strange
than she might have really seen if she
had been awake in the Land of the Rising
Sun.
But there were wonderful things for the
world to see in Japan when we were
young. Such things men had rarely
locked upon were there to gaze upon
when Japan drew up its blinds and threw
open its doors to all the continents. Great
mobiles gave up their lands and castles to
the state. The feudal lords, heads of
great families which had ruled Japan a
thousand years, the sword bearers who
had fought her battles and preserved her
fame in war; laid their wealth and dgni
incomes, on the altar of the New Japan.
Two hundred landed lords gave up their
estates to the emperor who was building
UP a kingdom which could have no room
for other lords than he. No such laying
down of rank and power had been seen
since the mobiles sacrificed their privileges
in the National Assembly of France,
eighty years before 1t was an event,
this surrender of its glories by a proud
nobility, which somebody has said throws
icto the shade the achievements of Peter
the Great, the reforms of Joseph II, and
even the French Revolution ITSELF 1t
was, at least. a sight which neither gods
ror men had seen more than once or
twice since the gentlewomen of Florence
flung their rings and bracelets on Savo-
narclas Bonfire of Vanities.
But Savonarola himself could hardly
have changed the whole life of a nation;
we know how his kingdom fell. Ard there
were crises and storms in Japan, with re-
volts against the new regime and risings
o. the old, and once when the streets of
Jaran ran with Japan's best blood, the
tragic close of thirty thousand lives mark
ed forever this parting of the ways be-
tween cast and west. Nor was 1t easy
for the emperor to deprive of their lost
privilege all the lords who had maganani-
mously laid down the rest. Yet SO small
a thing as the wearing of a sword came
necessarily to be forbidden, and slowly the
old tradition and picturesqueness of life
In Japan passed away before the nations
eyes. Japan was 10th to let it pass We
like to remember that story of the life of
a japanese Ambassador, who was attend
ed by a leading physician in Vienna. He
bad a bed such as any great lady in
Vienna might sleep upon, but in it the
physician found board upon which he
really lay, and hidden in the soft pillows
lay the old-fashioned head rest common in
the old Japan. How hard it is to let the
habits of a lifetime go,
But all Japan, indeed lived two lives in
these strange times. Its young men came
to Europe, saw our civilization, studied
our politics, and learned in our schools
Marquis Ito, with Count Inouye, came to