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of solemn fooling. Nevertheless, these narrow enclosures, where life is regulated by ancient customs and a religion of the past, are wonderfully preservative of ancestral institutions, of which they do not suffer the sap to escape.

The political scheme of Yeyasu-permeated as it is by the peculiar characreter of the soil-is the work neither of a revolutionist nor an ideologist. Its

a fortified precinct, the approaches to which were all occupied by the merchants and artisans who supplied their wants, he lived upon the produce of his own fief, and everything nourished in him the delusion of his own independence, though, in reality, his power was merely delegated. A strict watch was kept over him; and he was moved if occasion required, like a mere prefect. Presently he finds himself obliged to reside half the time, or the whole of every other year, at Yeddo, and he must leave his family there as hostages when he goes away. These removals and the obligation to keep up a sumptuous residence at the shogun's capital, tend to impoverish him. It is a favorite device in Japan to ruin a man by crushing him under a load of honors.

But if Yeyasu dismantles the feudal fortress, he strengthens the defences of the larger intrenchments. Far from desiring the absorption of small provinces in a greater, he sedulously keeps them closed against one another, and within their encircling walls, he arranges a complete hierarchy, a social scale of minute, but clearly marked, degrees. He had grasped the fact that the very docility of the Japanese temper demands a restricted horizon. The best defence for them against those forms of infatuation to which their natural solicitude inclined them would be an indissoluble attachment to local opinions and customs. He therefore subjected them to a kind of parochial tyranny, which was all the more strict because they exercised it over themselves. All individuality had to subside to one general level. Men dreaded to be singular, and did not even suffer their thoughts to stray outside the circle of secular conventions. Naturally indolent, their faculties became atrophied; naturally nice, they perfected things of no intrinsic value; naturally grave, they found pleasure in a species

main achievement was to give definite employment to all the national instincts, good and bad, which had been smothered and submerged in the civil wars, with their alternations of cloud and fire. The individual man did not count. The family, constituted as in the republics of Greece and Rome, was the sole vital unit. The code under which it exists makes no distinction between legality and morality. Only high state officials are permitted even to peruse that code. People are judged by laws of which they know nothing, and are not expected to know anything. Why, indeed, should they, since the individual act is never considered from the moral point of view, nor the social act from that of utility? The magistrates, those mirrors of government, can but reflect its methods. Moreover, the written laws are by no means numerous, and the judges interpret them according to custom, conscience, or the necessities of the moment.

Since no two of the cases brought before their tribunal were ever precisely identical, it would not do, they thought,

it would involve unfortunate mistakes -to depend too much upon previous verdicts. They, therefore, make a new jurisprudence for every separate case, and the judgments which they pronounce are never referred to another court. The abstract idea of law has never found its way into these minds which pass so easily from extreme violence to extreme docility. But the idea of duty ennobles and glorifies them, alternately subjugating and exalting.

The child is blindly submissive to its parents; the wife to her husband; the husband, if he be of low birth, to the samurai; the samurai to the prince; the prince to the shogun. The only commandments which are promulgated and publicly affixed all over the empire have the brevity and the generality of the Decalogue. Everybody knows that the smallest theft is punishable with death. The land belongs to nobody, because it all belongs, theoretically, to that shadowy personage the emperor. The shogun is but an overseer who permits its use by the daimios, who let it to the samurai, who farm it out to the peasants. The whole nation subsists upon a grand system of equivocations.

Buddhism, once disarmed, was no more to be dreaded. The noble Tokugawa abandoned it to the common people, and Confucianism was still the Bible of the samurai. They are both slave-making systems; the one by virtue of that passive resignation in which all individuality is speedily dissolved, the other because it makes men careless of servitude-if servitude be not too strong a word to use of a nation which has preserved, under a long course of rigid constraint, the loftier virtues of its heroic time.

An

steps, as they fall noiselessly on the
soft matting, a musical sound becomes
audible, something like a low, pro-
longed whistle. You have trodden on
the spot where the floor sings.
alarm has been given; and in the next
room faces are at once composed, and
the hands which had been brandishing
only fans, begin to toy with poniards.

But all these devices of an irresistible inquisition were partially neutralized by a sleepless devotion to the interests of the community and a profound sense of honor. The Tokugawa disciplined others in that stoicism to which the tragic adventures of the past had inured their own souls. The individual oppressed in intellect, and repressed in all his native impulses, had no road open to renown save that of renunciation and sacrifice. He summoned all his pride to help him carry a burden which he could not shake off. Always prepared for suicide, he despised a life which offered no scope for thought, or loved it only as encouraging the sterile inventions of an exasperated fancy. The souls of men became crystallized.

If peace be indeed the supreme boon to any people, Yeyasu may be looked upon as a great benefactor. And if the morality of the people consists merely in the harmonious subordination of its virtues to its political ends, and the universal subjugation of the individual to the state, the pious and tractable yet valiant Japanese stood on a higher plane than the Occidental nations.

Enslaved the Japanese surely were, as much as any people can be. Their minds have borne for ages those two certain marks of oppression—a habit of suspicion and a smiling hypocrisy. Those whom I have known at all intimately have always made me think of those ancient seignorial residences which I visited at Kioto. You walk into them on a level; there are no locks on the doors, and the sliding frames move silently along their grooves. Veined woods and painted panels, and snow-white tatamis give you a smiling welcome. What frank and simple hospitality! The whole palace is at your disposal. All at once, beneath your cipitated the fall of the ancient

But however stationary a country may be, the fatal processes of life go on incessantly within it. A government may be, to all appearance, indestructible, yet opposition and death will forge their silent way. Behind that fair front of tranquility and assurance the Tokugawa had to endure the reaction of the same phenomena, the same anomalies which had preceded and pre

powers. The foresight of Yeyas and the wisdom of Bakufu could but delay their progress.

The shogun became less and less of a personage, and gradually disappeared behind his ministers. His effeminate court, where great lords danced attendance and concubines aimed at supremacy, absorbed the entire wealth of the empire, and all it taught the young nobility was to despise the sword and paint their faces with skill. Yeddo became a city of courtesans and ronins, of ostentatious prodigality and expensive vice. The daimio fell under the influence of his principal samurai. Intrigues were hatched in dark corners, and coteries disputed the possession of his person and his inheritance. From end to end of Japan the inferior watches, controls, besets and finally directs his superior. It becomes the unvarying law of Japanese life. But reverence for form, care for appearances, dread of the Bakufu, and the utter impossibility of conceiving a different order of things, bridle and disguise for a time the anarchy which is latent there.

The emperor, pensioned by the shogun, lives in perpetual retirement in the Residence at Kioto. The government, forgetting the principles of Yeyasu, either neglects him altogether or treats him with derisive parsimony. Near the beginning of the present century, his divinity was bankrupt and his palace in such a state of dis-repair that the rain came through the roof upon the imperial head. Of the princes who constitute his immediate suite-the kuges -some are actually obliged to work for their living. I have been told by the Japanese themselves of men of that race who used to go in disguise by night and cook in the most popular restaurants of the city. So long as the shogun went every year, and did public homage to the mikado, the people failed to remark the decline of the im

perial power. But from the day when Yeddo, in the insolence of its riches, abandoned that tradition of courtesy, the eyes of the nation, blinded no longer by the fumes of civil war, were gradually opened to the startling contrast between the splendor of the shogunal court and the destitution of the Heir of the Sun. Peace brought with it to Japan a revelation of the fatal fact that their political tradition had been belied for centuries.

It was in the noble house of the Tokugawa themselves, in that of the Prince of Mito, that this subversive idea first dawned. He was one of those who had given a warm welcome to the Chinese philosophers exiled from their own country, and under their guidance had collected the materials for a history of Japan. Studies of this nature could not fail to bring out the fact that the imperial power had been usurped by the emperor's vassals. It

is quite probable that the Chinese, who are keener than the sons of Japan, had helped by their explanations of the true doctrine of Confucius once more to concentrate upon the Father of his People that sentiment of loyalty, which had been wrested by time-honored fallacies to the benefit of the shoguns. At all events, the principles of Mito slowly worked their way across Japan until they reached the provinces of Choshiu and Satsuma, where they were welcomed with enthusiasm as reinforcing the undying rancor of those provinces.

On the other hand, Shintoism, which had been disdained by the Tokugawa, and cast into the shade by the Buddhist ceremonial,-Shintoism which asserts the divine origin of Japan and of its emperor's person, began to have for the first time its theorists and expositors. They made a valiant stand against Chinese civilization, so-called, and those philosophers in pig-tails "who promulgated such fine maxims and as

sassinated their masters." They lauded the primitive simplicity of the mikados, revealed its decline under cover of imposing ceremonies, and showed how, under the influence of outlandish notions, power had passed from their hands into those of their servants. So far as I can judge, these philosophers were but poor logicians;-their metaphysics at once childish and pretentious. But they went back to the sources of the nation's life, and revived in the minds of their hearers and their readers a story of which the memory had long been effaced by the almost exclusive study of the Chinese annals. The hidden sense of their dicta, the political doctrine which these involved, gave to the oldest of old saws a youth and vivacity which recommended them to the minds of men. In fine, the reformers endeavored to illuminate that drowsy chaos with a slender beam of true wisdom. They were honest souls and the common people heard them gladly.

In the year 1840 a poor samurai named Tokayama travelled half the length of Japan to see the palace of the emperor. He went by way of Yeddo

Revue des Deux Mondes.

where the splendor of the shogun's ramparts filled his soul with wrathand when he reached Kioto and saw the ruinous residence of his decrepit god, and realized his utter abandonment, he fell upon his knees and bowed his forehead in the dust, and subsequently returned home with a heart so torn by compassion that he died of it. The example of this melancholy mortal proved exceedingly affecting. The exactions of the daimios, the frequent occurrence of famines and fires, the cataclysms of nature, the general relaxation of discipline, which filled the country with robbers and other adventurers, the universal presentiment of some vague and mysterious agonyall these things predisposed the popular mind to incarnate its desires in that unknown and captive emperor, whose disgrace appeared more pitiful than its own misery. A new sentiment compounded of tenderness and reverence that exquisite devotion which the oppressed can feel for a fainting delty -was awakened here and there in the heart of the masses. Pity that circumstances had not given this sentiment time to mature!

(To be concluded.)

André Bellesort.

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TOWN CHILDREN IN THE COUNTRY.

The Board of Education has recently issued a Circular which enables managers and teachers in the Rural Elementary schools to take their scholars for school walks in the country, and there to teach them something of natural history, surrounded by the sights and sounds which should excite observation and awaken intellectual curiosity. But this is not all. The Department has also arranged, in the Code of this session, changes in view of which it may be of some value to tell of a small experiment made last summer to stimulate an interest in Nature in the minds of a few of the 32,000 children who were sent by the Children's Country Holiday Fund into the country for a fortnight's holiday. The methods adopted were simple. A letter was written, printed and sent to every London teacher whose scholars were going into the country, to many school managers, and to the clergy and others who were likely to come in contact with the children. In this letter we told our aim, asked for the aid of the teacher's sympathy and were careful to explain that

Our hope is not so much that the children should learn certain facts about Nature so that they can pass an examination, but that they should learn to observe; for we believe that in so doing they may find pleasure and profit, and that by degrees observation will develop both reverence and care.

We also wrote a letter to be given to those children who might wish to join in the plan after hearing about it from the teachers, and to this letter we added an imaginary examination paper, which served to show the kind of questions which we were planning to ask, questions which did not require study

or imply knowledge, but mainly demanded observation and intelligence. But sending papers and printed letters did not exhaust our efforts to make our little plan known. Mrs. Franklin of the "Parents' National Educational Union," to whose inspiration the plan owes its birth, and two other ladies were so good as to visit certain schools and (having secured the sympathy of the teachers) to explain to the children in simple talks some of the beauties they were to seek, or something of the pleasures such seeking would bring to them.

On the 27th of July some 16,000 happy children trooped into the country; two weeks afterwards another 16,000 took their places. All were back by the 26th of August, and by the 10th of September our questions were in their hands-ten easy questions for Standards III and IV, and ten questlons on the same lines, but demanding closer observation, for Standards V and VI.

Children from 470 London schools were sent into the country. Fifty-two schools applied for our questions, taking 1,161 copies; but only twenty-seven schools sent in replies, as only 330 children had tried to answer in writing. But still, inadequate as was the response to the amount of effort which had been put forth, neither Mr. R. E. S. Hart, the Assistant-Secretary of the Children's Holiday Fund (who had done most of the work), nor I felt discouraged. We had made a beginning, and now that the same aim is adopted by the Government for the country children, and that greater publicity will show up the object and simplicity of the plan, it is hoped that an increasing number of children will this summer begin to observe, and will find a

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