第 二 章 · THE GENIUS OF JAPANESE CIVILIZATION

I

Without losing a single ship or a single battle, Japan has broken

down the power of China, made a new Korea, enlarged her own

territory, and changed the whole political face of the East.

Astonishing as this has seemed politically, it is much more

astonishing psychologically; for it represents the result of a

vast play of capacities with which the race had never been

credited abroad,--capacities of a very high order. The

psychologist knows that the so-called "adoption of Western

civilization" within a time of thirty years cannot mean the

addition to the Japanese brain of any organs or powers previously

absent from it. He knows that it cannot mean any sudden change in

the mental or moral character of the race. Such changes are not

made in a generation. Transmitted civilization works much more

slowly, requiring even hundreds of years to produce certain

permanent psychological results.

Chapter 2. THE GENIUS OF JAPANESE CIVILIZATION

ars the most extraordinary

country in the world; and the most wonderful thing in the whole

episode of her "Occidentalization" is that the race brain could

bear so heavy a shock. Nevertheless, though the fact be unique in

human history, what does it really mean? Nothing more than

rearrangement of a part of the pre-existing machinery of thought.

Even that, for thousands of brave young minds, was death. The

adoption of Western civilization was not nearly such an easy

matter as un-thinking persons imagined. And it is quite evident

that the mental readjustments, effected at a cost which remains

to be told, have given good results only along directions in

which the race had always shown capacities of special kinds.

Thus, the appliances of Western industrial invention have worked

admirably in Japanese hands,--have produced excellent results in

those crafts at which the nation had been skillful, in other and

quainter ways, for ages. There has been no transformation,

--nothing more than the turning of old abilities into new and

larger channels. The scientific professions tell the same story.

For certain forms of science, such as medicine, surgery (there

are no better surgeons in the world than the

Japanese), chemistry, microscopy, the Japanese genius is

naturally adapted; and in all these it has done work already

heard of round the world. In war and statecraft it has shown

wonderful power; but throughout their history the Japanese have

been characterized by great military and political capacity.

Nothing remarkable has been done, however, in directions foreign

to the national genius. In the study, for example, of Western

music, Western art, Western literature, time would seem to have

been simply wasted(1). These things make appeal extraordinary to

emotional life with us; they make no such appeal to Japanese

emotional life. Every serious thinker knows that emotional

transformation of the individual through education is impossible.

To imagine that the emotional character of an Oriental race could

be transformed in the short space of thirty years, by the contact

of Occidental ideas, is absurd. Emotional life, which is older

than intellectual life, and deeper, can no more be altered

suddenly by a change of milieu than the surface of a mirror can

be changed by passing reflections. All that Japan has been able

to do so miraculously well has been done without any

self-transformation; and those who imagine her emotionally closer

to us to-day than she may have been thirty years ago ignore facts

of science which admit of no argument.

Sympathy is limited by comprehension. We may sympathize to the

same degree that we understand. One may imagine that he

sympathizes with a Japanese or a Chinese; but the sympathy can

never be real to more than a small extent outside of the simplest

phases of common emotional life,--those phases in which child and

man are at one. The more complex feelings of the Oriental have

been composed by combinations of experiences, ancestral and

individual, which have had no really precise correspondence in

Western life, and which we can therefore not fully know. For

converse reasons, the Japanese cannot, even though they would,

give Europeans their best sympathy.

But while it remains impossible for the man of the West to

discern the true color of Japanese life, either intellectual or

emotional (since the one is woven into the other), it is equally

impossible for him to escape the conviction that, compared with

his own, it is very small. It is dainty; it holds delicate

potentialities of rarest interest and value; but it is otherwise

so small that Western life, by contrast with it, seems almost

supernatural. For we must judge visible and measurable

manifestations. So judging, what a contrast between the emotional

and intellectual worlds of West and East! Far less striking that

between the frail wooden streets of the Japanese capital and the

tremendous solidity of a thoroughfare in Paris or London. When

one compares the utterances which West and East have given to

their dreams, their aspirations, their sensations,--a Gothic

cathedral with a Shinto temple, an opera by Verdi or a trilogy by

Wagner with a performance of geisha, a European epic with a

Japanese poem,--how incalculable the difference in emotional

volume, in imaginative power, in artistic synthesis! True, our

music is an essentially modern art; but in looking back through

all our past the difference in creative force is scarcely less

marked,--not surely in the period of Roman magnificence, of

marble amphitheatres and of aqueducts spanning provinces, nor in

the Greek period of the divine in sculpture and of the supreme in

literature.

And this leads to the subject of another wonderful fact in the

sudden development of Japanese power. Where are the outward

material signs of that immense new force she has been showing

both in productivity and in war? Nowhere! That which we miss in

her emotional and intellectual life is missing also from her

industrial and commercial life,--largeness! The land remains what

it was before; its face has scarcely been modified by all the

changes of Meiji. The miniature railways and telegraph poles, the

bridges and tunnels, might almost escape notice in the ancient

green of the landscapes. In all the cities, with the exception of

the open ports and their little foreign settlements, there exists

hardly a street vista suggesting the teaching of Western ideas.

You might journey two hundred miles through the interior of the

country, looking in vain for large manifestations of the new

civilization. In no place do you find commerce exhibiting its

ambition in gigantic warehouses, or industry expanding its

machinery under acres of roofing. A Japanese city is still, as it

was ten centuries ago, little more than a wilderness of wooden

sheds,--picturesque, indeed, as paper lanterns are, but scarcely

less frail. And there is no great stir and noise anywhere,--no

heavy traffic, no booming and rumbling, no furious haste. In

Tokyo itself you may enjoy, if you wish, the peace of a country

village. This want of visible or audible signs of the new-found

force which is now menacing the markets of the West and changing

the maps of the far East gives one a queer, I might even say a

weird feeling. It is almost the sensation received when, after

climbing through miles of silence to reach some Shinto shrine,

you find voidness only and solitude,--an elfish, empty little

wooden structure, mouldering in shadows a thousand years old. The

strength of Japan, like the strength of her ancient faith, needs

little material display: both exist where the deepest real power

of any great people exists,--in the Race Ghost.

(1) In one limited sense, Western art has influenced Japanese.

literature and drama; but the character of the influence proves

the racial difference to which I refer. European plays have been

reshaped for the Japanese stage, and European novels rewritten

for Japanese readers. But a literal version is rarely attempted;

for the original incidents, thoughts, and emotions would be

unintelligible to the average reader or playgoer. Plots are

adopted; sentiments and incidents are totally transformed. "The

New Magdalen" becomes a Japanese girl who married an Eta. Victor

Hugo's _Les Miserables_ becomes a tale of the Japanese civil war;

and Enjolras a Japanese student. There have been a few rare

exceptions, including the marked success of a literal translation

of the _Sorrows of Werther_.

II

As I muse, the remembrance of a great city comes back to me,--a

city walled up to the sky and roaring like the sea. The memory of

that roar returns first; then the vision defines: a chasm, which

is a street, between mountains, which are houses. I am tired,

because I have walked many miles between those precipices of

masonry, and have trodden no earth,--only slabs of rock,--and

have heard nothing but thunder of tumult. Deep below those huge

pavements I know there is a cavernous world tremendous: systems

underlying systems of ways contrived for water and steam and

fire. On either hand tower facades pierced by scores of tiers of

windows,--cliffs of architecture shutting out the sun. Above, the

pale blue streak of sky is cut by a maze of spidery lines,--an

infinite cobweb of electric wires. In that block on the right

there dwell nine thousand souls; the tenants of the edifice

facing it pay the annual rent of a million dollars. Seven

millions scarcely covered the cost of those bulks overshadowing

the square beyond,--and there are miles of such. Stairways of

steel and cement, of brass and stone, with costliest balustrades,

ascend through the decades and double-decades of stories; but no

foot treads them. By water-power, by steam, by electricity, men

go up and down; the heights are too dizzy, the distances too

great, for the use of the limbs. My friend who pays rent of five

thousand dollars for his rooms in the fourteenth story of a

monstrosity not far off has never trodden his stairway. I am

walking for curiosity alone; with a serious purpose I should not

walk: the spaces are too broad, the time is too precious, for

such slow exertion,--men travel from district to district, from

house to office, by steam. Heights are too great for the voice to

traverse; orders are given and obeyed by machinery. By

electricity far-away doors are opened; with one touch a hundred

rooms are lighted or heated.

And all this enormity is hard, grim, dumb; it is the enormity of

mathematical power applied to utilitarian ends of solidity and

durability. These leagues of palaces, of warehouses, of business

structures, of buildings describable and indescribable, are not

beautiful, but sinister. One feels depressed by the mere

sensation of the enormous life which created them, life without

sympathy; of their prodigious manifestation of power, power

without pity. They are the architectural utterance of the new

industrial age. And there is no halt in the thunder of wheels, in

the storming of hoofs and of human feet. To ask a question, one

must shout into the ear of the questioned; to see, to understand,

to move in that high-pressure medium, needs experience. The

unaccustomed feels the sensation of being in a panic, in a

tempest, in a cyclone. Yet all this is order.

The monster streets leap rivers, span sea-ways, with bridges of

stone, bridges of steel. Far as the eye can reach, a bewilderment

of masts, a web-work of rigging, conceals the shores, which are

cliffs of masonry. Trees in a forest stand less thickly, branches

in a forest mingle less closely, than the masts and spars of that

immeasurable maze. Yet all is order.

III

Generally speaking, we construct for endurance, the Japanese for

impermanency. Few things for common use are made in Japan with a

view to durability. The straw sandals worn out and replaced at

each stage of a journey, the robe consisting of a few simple

widths loosely stitched together for wearing, and unstitched

again for washing, the fresh chopsticks served to each new guest

at a hotel, the light shoji frames serving at once for windows

and walls, and repapered twice a year; the mattings renewed every

autumn,--all these are but random examples of countless small

things in daily life that illustrate the national contentment

with impermanency.

What is the story of a common Japanese dwelling? Leaving my home

in the morning, I observe, as I pass the corner of the next

street crossing mine, some men setting up bamboo poles on a

vacant lot there. Returning after five hours' absence, I find on

the same lot the skeleton of a two-story house. Next forenoon I

see that the walls are nearly finished already,--mud and wattles.

By sundown the roof has been completely tiled. On the following

morning I observe that the mattings have been put down, and the

inside plastering has been finished. In five days the house is

completed. This, of course, is a cheap building; a fine one would

take much longer to put up and finish. But Japanese cities are

for the most part composed of such common buildings. They are as

cheap as they are simple.

I cannot now remember where I first met with the observation that

the curve of the Chinese roof might preserve the memory of the

nomad tent. The idea haunted me long after I had ungratefully

forgotten the book in which I found it; and when I first saw, in

Izumo, the singular structure of the old Shinto temples, with

queer cross-projections at their gable-ends and upon their

roof-ridges, the suggestion of the forgotten essayist about the

possible origin of much less ancient forms returned to me with

great force. But there is much in Japan besides primitive

architectural traditions to indicate a nomadic ancestry for the

race. Always and everywhere there is a total absence of what we

would call solidity; and the characteristics of impermanence seem

to mark almost everything in the exterior life of the people,

except, indeed, the immemorial costume of the peasant and the

shape of the implements of his toil. Not to dwell upon the fact

that even during the comparatively brief period of her written

history Japan has had more than sixty capitals, of which the

greater number have completely disappeared, it may be broadly

stated that every Japanese city is rebuilt within the time of a

generation. Some temples and a few colossal fortresses offer

exceptions; but, as a general rule, the Japanese city changes its

substance, if not its form, in the lifetime of a man. Fires,

earth-quakes, and many other causes partly account for this; the

chief reason, however, is that houses are not built to last. The

common people have no ancestral homes. The dearest spot to all

is, not the place of birth, but the place of burial; and there is

little that is permanent save the resting-places of the dead and

the sites of the ancient shrines.

The land itself is a land of impermanence. Rivers shift their

courses, coasts their outline, plains their level; volcanic peaks

heighten or crumble; valleys are blocked by lava-floods or

landslides; lakes appear and disappear. Even the matchless shape

of Fuji, that snowy miracle which has been the inspiration of

artists for centuries, is said to have been slightly changed

since my advent to the country; and not a few other mountains

have in the same short time taken totally new forms. Only the

general lines of the land, the general aspects of its nature, the

general character of the seasons, remain fixed. Even the very

beauty of the landscapes is largely illusive,--a beauty of

shifting colors and moving mists. Only he to whom those

landscapes are familiar can know how their mountain vapors make

mockery of real changes which have been, and ghostly predictions

of other changes yet to be, in the history of the archipelago.

The gods, indeed, remain,--haunt their homes upon the hills,

diffuse a soft religious awe through the twilight of their

groves, perhaps because they are without form and substance.

Their shrines seldom pass utterly into oblivion, like the

dwellings of men. But every Shinto temple is necessarily rebuilt

at more or less brief intervals; and the holiest,--the shrine of

Ise,--in obedience to immemorial custom, must be demolished every

twenty years, and its timbers cut into thousands of tiny charms,

which are distributed to pilgrims.

From Aryan India, through China, came Buddhism, with its vast

doctrine of impermanency. The builders of the first Buddhist

temples in Japan--architects of another race--built well: witness

the Chinese structures at Kamakura that have survived so many

centuries, while of the great city which once surrounded them not

a trace remains. But the psychical influence of Buddhism could in

no land impel minds to the love of material stability. The

teaching that the universe is an illusion; that life is but one

momentary halt upon an infinite journey; that all attachment to

persons, to places, or to things must be fraught with sorrow;

that only through suppression of every desire--even the desire of

Nirvana itself--can humanity reach the eternal peace, certainly

harmonized with the older racial feeling. Though the people never

much occupied themselves with the profounder philosophy of the

foreign faith, its doctrine of impermanency must, in course of

time, have profoundly influenced national character. It explained

and consoled; it imparted new capacity to bear all things

bravely; it strengthened that patience which is a trait of the

race. Even in Japanese art--developed, if not actually created,

under Buddhist influence--the doctrine of impermanency has left

its traces. Buddhism taught that nature was a dream, an illusion,

a phantasmagoria; but it also taught men how to seize the

fleeting impressions of that dream, and how to interpret them in

relation to the highest truth. And they learned well. In the

flushed splendor of the blossom-bursts of spring, in the coming

and the going of the cicada, in the dying crimson of autumn

foliage, in the ghostly beauty of snow, in the delusive motion of

wave or cloud, they saw old parables of perpetual meaning. Even

their calamities--fire, flood, earthquake, pestilence--

interpreted to them unceasingly the doctrine of the eternal

Vanishing.

_All things which exist in Time must perish. The forests, the

mountains,--all things thus exist. In Time are born all things

having desire._

_The Sun and Moon, Sakra himself with all the multitude of his

attendants, will all, without exception, perish; there is not one

that will endure._

_In the beginning things were fixed; in the end again they

separate: different combinations cause other substance; for in

nature there is no uniform and constant principle._

_All component things must grow old; impermanent are all

component things. Even unto a grain of sesamum seed there is no

such thing as a compound which is permanent. All are transient;

all have the inherent quality of dissolution._

_All component things, without exception, are impermanent,

unstable, despicable, sure to depart, disintegrating; all are

temporary as a mirage, as a phantom, or as foam.... Even as all

earthen vessels made by the potter end in being broken, so end

the lives of men._

_And a belief in matter itself is unmentionable and

inexpressible,--it is neither a thing nor no-thing: and this is

known even by children and ignorant persons._

IV

Now it is worth while to inquire if there be not some

compensatory value attaching to this impermanency and this

smallness in the national life.

Nothing is more characteristic of that life than its extreme

fluidity. The Japanese population represents a medium whose

particles are in perpetual circulation. The motion is in itself

peculiar. It is larger and more eccentric than the motion of

Occidental populations, though feebler between points. It is also

much more natural,--so natural that it could not exist in Western

civilization. The relative mobility of a European population and

the Japanese population might be expressed by a comparison

between certain high velocities of vibration and certain low

ones. But the high velocities would represent, in such a

comparison, the consequence of artificial force applied; the

slower vibrations would not. And this difference of kind would

mean more than surface indications could announce. In one sense,

Americans may be right in thinking themselves great travelers. In

another, they are certainly wrong; the man of the people in

America cannot compare, as a traveler, with the man of the people

in Japan. And of course, in considering relative mobility of

populations, one must consider chiefly the great masses, the

workers,--not merely the small class of wealth. In their own

country, the Japanese are the greatest travelers of any civilized

people. They are the greatest travelers because, even in a land

composed mainly of mountain chains, they recognize no obstacles

to travel. The Japanese who travels most is not the man who needs

railways or steamers to carry him.

Now, with us, the common worker is incomparably less free than

the common worker in Japan. He is less free because of the more

complicated mechanism of Occidental societies, whose forces tend

to agglomeration and solid integration. He is less free because

the social and industrial machinery on which he must depend

reshapes him to its own particular requirements, and always so as

to evolve some special and artificial capacity at the cost of

other inherent capacity. He is less free because he must live at

a standard making it impossible for him to win financial

independence by mere thrift. To achieve any such independence, he

must possess exceptional character and exceptional faculties

greater than those of thousands of exceptional competitors

equally eager to escape from the same thralldom. In brief, then,

he is less independent because the special character of his

civilization numbs his natural power to live without the help of

machinery or large capital. To live thus artificially means to

lose, sooner or later, the power of independent movement. Before

a Western man can move he has many things to consider. Before a

Japanese moves he has nothing to consider. He simply leaves the

place he dislikes, and goes to the place he wishes, without any

trouble. There is nothing to prevent him. Poverty is not an

obstacle, but a stimulus. Impedimenta he has none, or only such

as he can dispose of in a few minutes. Distances have no

significance for him. Nature has given him perfect feet that can

spring him over fifty miles a day without pain; a stomach whose

chemistry can extract ample nourishment from food on which no

European could live; and a constitution that scorns heat, cold,

and damp alike, because still unimpaired by unhealthy clothing,

by superfluous comforts, by the habit of seeking warmth from

grates and stoves, and by the habit of wearing leather shoes.

It seems to me that the character of our footgear signifies more

than is commonly supposed. The footgear represents in itself a

check upon individual freedom. It signifies this even in

costliness; but in form it signifies infinitely more. It has

distorted the Western foot out of the original shape, and

rendered it incapable of the work for which it was evolved. The

physical results are not limited to the foot. Whatever acts as a

check, directly or indirectly, upon the organs of locomotion must

extend its effects to the whole physical constitution. Does the

evil stop even there? Perhaps we submit to conventions the most

absurd of any existing in any civilization because we have too

long submitted to the tyranny of shoemakers. There may be defects

in our politics, in our social ethics, in our religious system,

more or less related to the habit of wearing leather shoes.

Submission to the cramping of the body must certainly aid in

developing submission to the cramping of the mind.

The Japanese man of the people--the skilled laborer able to

underbid without effort any Western artisan in the same line of

industry--remains happily independent of both shoemakers and

tailors. His feet are good to look at, his body is healthy, and

his heart is free. If he desire to travel a thousand miles, he

can get ready for his journey in five minutes. His whole outfit

need not cost seventy-five cents; and all his baggage can be put

into a handkerchief. On ten dollars he can travel for a year

without work, or he can travel simply on his ability to work, or

he can travel as a pilgrim. You may reply that any savage can do

the same thing. Yes, but any civilized man cannot; and the

Japanese has been a highly civilized man for at least a thousand

years. Hence his present capacity to threaten Western

manufacturers.

We have been too much accustomed to associate this kind of

independent mobility with the life of our own beggars and tramps,

to have any just conception of its intrinsic meaning. We have

thought of it also in connection with unpleasant

things,--uncleanliness and bad smells. But, as Professor

Chamberlain has well said, "a Japanese crowd is the sweetest in

the world" Your Japanese tramp takes his hot bath daily, if he

has a fraction of a cent to pay for it, or his cold bath, if he

has not. In his little bundle there are combs, toothpicks,

razors, toothbrushes. He never allows himself to become

unpleasant. Reaching his destination, he can transform himself

into a visitor of very nice manners, and faultless though simple

attire(1).

Ability to live without furniture, without impedimenta, with the

least possible amount of neat clothing, shows more than the

advantage held by this Japanese race in the struggle of life; it

shows also the real character of some weaknesses in our own

civilization. It forces reflection upon the useless multiplicity

of our daily wants. We must have meat and bread and butter; glass

windows and fire; hats, white shirts, and woolen underwear; boots

and shoes; trunks, bags, and boxes; bedsteads, mattresses,

sheets, and blankets: all of which a Japanese can do without, and

is really better off without. Think for a moment how important an

article of Occidental attire is the single costly item of white

shirts! Yet even the linen shirt, the so-called "badge of a

gentleman," is in itself a useless garment. It gives neither

warmth nor comfort. It represents in our fashions the survival of

something once a luxurious class distinction, but to-day

meaningless and useless as the buttons sewn on the outside of

coat-sleeves.

(1) Critics have tried to make fun of Sir Edwin Arnold's

remark that a Japanese crowd smells like a geranium-flower. Yet

the simile is exact! The perfume called jako, when sparingly

used, might easily be taken for the odor of a musk-geranium. In

almost any Japanese assembly including women a slight perfume of

jako is discernible; for the robes worn have been laid in drawers

containing a few grains of jako. Except for this delicate scent,

a Japanese crowd is absolutely odorless.

V

The absence of any huge signs of the really huge things that

Japan has done bears witness to the very peculiar way in which

her civilization has been working. It cannot forever so work; but

it has so worked thus far with amazing success. Japan is

producing without capital, in our large sense of the word. She

has become industrial without becoming essentially mechanical and

artificial. The vast rice crop is raised upon millions of tiny,

tiny farms; the silk crop, in millions of small poor homes, the

tea crop, on countless little patches of soil. If you visit Kyoto

to order something from one of the greatest porcelain makers in

the world, one whose products are known better in London and in

Paris than even in Japan, you will find the factory to be a

wooden cottage in which no American farmer would live. The

greatest maker of cloisonne vases, who may ask you two hundred

dollars for something five inches high, produces his miracles

behind a two-story frame dwelling containing perhaps six small

rooms. The best girdles of silk made in Japan, and famous

throughout the Empire, are woven in a house that cost scarcely

five hundred dollars to build. The work is, of course,

hand-woven. But the factories weaving by machinery--and weaving

so well as to ruin foreign industries of far vaster capacity--are

hardly more imposing, with very few exceptions. Long, light, low

one-story or two-story sheds they are, about as costly to erect

as a row of wooden stables with us. Yet sheds like these turn out

silks that sell all round the world. Sometimes only by inquiry,

or by the humming of the machinery, can you distinguish a factory

from an old yashiki, or an old-fashioned Japanese school

building,--unless indeed you can read the Chinese characters over

the garden gate. Some big brick factories and breweries exist;

but they are very few, and even when close to the foreign

settlements they seem incongruities in the landscape.

Our own architectural monstrosities and our Babels of machinery

have been brought into existence by vast integrations of

industrial capital. But such integrations do not exist in the Far

East; indeed, the capital to make them does not exist. And

supposing that in the course of a few generations there should

form in Japan corresponding combinations of money power, it is

not easy to suppose correspondences in architectural

construction. Even two-story edifices of brick have given bad

results in the leading commercial centre; and earthquakes seem to

condemn Japan to perpetual simplicity in building. The very land

revolts against the imposition of Western architecture, and

occasionally even opposes the new course of traffic by pushing

railroad lines out of level and out of shape.

Not industry alone still remains thus unintegrated; government

itself exhibits a like condition. Nothing is fixed except the

Throne. Perpetual change is identical with state policy.

Ministers, governors, superintendents, inspectors, all high civil

and military officials, are shifted at irregular and surprisingly

short intervals, and hosts of smaller officials scatter each time

with the whirl. The province in which I passed the first

twelvemonth of my residence in Japan has had four different

governors in five years. During my stay at Kumamoto, and before

the war had begun, the military command of that important post

was three times changed. The government college had in three

years three directors. In educational circles, especially, the

rapidity of such changes has been phenomenal. There have been five

different ministers of education in my own time, and more than

five different educational policies. The twenty-six thousand

public schools are so related in their management to the local

assemblies that, even were no other influences at work, constant

change would be inevitable because of the changes in the

assemblies. Directors and teachers keep circling from post to

post; there are men little more than thirty years old who have

taught in almost every province of the country. That any

educational system could have produced any great results under

these conditions seems nothing short of miraculous.

We are accustomed to think that some degree of stability is

necessary to all real progress, all great development. But Japan

has given proof irrefutable that enormous development is possible

without any stability at all. The explanation is in the race

character,--a race character in more ways than one the very

opposite of our own. Uniformly mobile, and thus uniformly

impressionable, the nation has moved unitedly in the direction of

great ends, submitting the whole volume of its forty millions to

be moulded by the ideas of its rulers, even as sand or as water

is shaped by wind. And this submissiveness to reshaping belongs

to the old conditions of its soul life,--old conditions of rare

unselfishness and perfect faith. The relative absence from the

national character of egotistical individualism has been the

saving of an empire; has enabled a great people to preserve its

independence against prodigious odds. Wherefore Japan may well be

grateful to her two great religions, the creators and the

preservers of her moral power to Shinto, which taught the

individual to think of his Emperor and of his country before

thinking either of his own family or of himself; and to Buddhism,

which trained him to master regret, to endure pain, and to accept

as eternal law the vanishing of things loved and the tyranny of

things hated.

To-day there is visible a tendency to hardening,--a danger of

changes leading to the integration of just such an officialism as

that which has proved the curse and the weakness of China. The

moral results of the new education have not been worthy of the

material results. The charge of want of "individuality," in the

accepted sense of pure selfishness, will scarcely be made against

the Japanese of the next century. Even the compositions of

students already reflect the new conception of intellectual

strength only as a weapon of offense, and the new sentiment of

aggressive egotism. "Impermanency," writes one, with a fading

memory of Buddhism in his mind, "is the nature of our life. We

see often persons who were rich yesterday, and are poor to-day.

This is the result of human competition, according to the law of

evolution. We are exposed to that competition. We must fight each

other, even if we are not inclined to do so. With what sword

shall we fight? With the sword of knowledge, forged by

education."

Well, there are two forms of the cultivation of Self. One leads

to the exceptional development of the qualities which are noble,

and the other signifies something about which the less said the

better. But it is not the former which the New Japan is now

beginning to study. I confess to being one of those who believe

that the human heart, even in the history of a race, may be worth

infinitely more than the human intellect, and that it will sooner

or later prove itself infinitely better able to answer all the

cruel enigmas of the Sphinx of Life. I still believe that the old

Japanese were nearer to the solution of those enigmas than are

we, just because they recognized moral beauty as greater than

intellectual beauty. And, by way of conclusion, I may venture to

quote from an article on education by Ferdinand Brunetiere:--

"All our educational measures will prove vain, if there be no

effort to force into the mind, and to deeply impress upon it, the

sense of those fine words of Lamennais: '_Human society is based

upon mutual giving, or upon the sacrifice of man for man, or of

each man for all other men; and sacrifice is the very essence of

all true society._' It is this that we have been unlearning for

nearly a century; and if we have to put ourselves to school

afresh, it will be in order that we may learn it again. Without

such knowledge there can be no society and no education,--not, at

least, if the object of education be to form man for society.

Individualism is to-day the enemy of education, as it is also the

enemy of social order. It has not been so always; but it has so

become. It will not be so forever; but it is so now. And without

striving to destroy it-which would mean to fall from one extreme

into another--we must recognize that, no matter what we wish to

do for the family, for society, for education, and for the

country, it is against individualism that the work will have to

be done."

III