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idea of law of a people who had hitherto bowed only to a rough and incomplete sense of moral obligation banded down from age to age. It sounds very illogical. Usually it is the lower orders who stubbornly and patiently achieve their rights. Here certain principles of social equity, liberty, equality, seemed to fall from an unknown heaven, and they no more satisfied the deeper cravings of men's minds, than the introduction of tobacco satisfied their hearts. I do not say that these things are inmaterial to the greatness of a nation; but he who would get glory from them, as well as profit, must have desired and discerned them beforehand. The benefits of the change never appeared to the Japanese themselves in the light of a reward for long sustained effort. The classes who had hitherto been sacrificed, regarded it only as the lucky caprice of a vaguely conceived Providence. A Japanese once said in my hearing: "This civilization is a mighty fine thing! Our climate is a great deal milder since we had it! Less snow, and the winters not nearly so hard!" He never dreamed, in his simplicity, of attributing to any conscious mind the inauguration of that more benign era of which he vaguely experienced the comfort. And, as a matter of fact, mind had very little to do with it.

ning the main object of their policythey fancied they might learn from them how to find the crevice in our armor, that weak spot which they had never been able to discover, but their knowledge of which might keep us in check. One day in the Japanese Parliament, when orators were citing, in support of their opinions, examples from Greece, Rome, the French Revolution, and American history, a deputy cried out: "Give us some Japanese examples!" He was quite right, but so were the orators. They could not possibly have founded their modern theses on the past of Japan. Liberty, justice, respect for the rights of the individual-all that goes to make up the ideal of the West-"we should never have sought thee, if we had not already found thee!" The Japanese never "found" this ideal; we brought it to them; but, for good or evil, they are seeking it now!

And how are they seeking it? Cautiously, with no fixed method, with grotesque inconsistencies, yet in the best way, perhaps, if it be true that a national ideal ought to grow and ripen insensibly in the mind of the people before it is consciously and deliberately formulated by its leaders. Ever since 1875, Japan has been officially governed by the class whom a Japanese artisan once called "The Students." A samurai from Tosa, Itagaki-one of those rare politicians who pique themselves on remaining poor, a somewhat visionary person, whom his friends describe as equally versed in Jean Jacques and the Chinese philosophers

That conception of a more hutoane life of a balance of rights and duties at which we arrive so painfully by ways rugged and steep and set with stations of the cross, the Japanese thought to attain by simply soaring. They asked of our science and philos--brought his learning and the fervor ophy only material applications and immediate advantages. Ideas which we love, less for the advantage we derive from them than for their own beauty, the Japanese did not love at all, but thought they could adopt and make servants of them. Most of alland this was, perhaps, in the begin

of his southern nature to bear on the development of the representative idea. He harried the ministers, petitioned the emperor, wore out all the roads in Japan, and at the head of a party which called itself "liberal" he persuaded the Students-who were then in power-that the establish

ment of parliamentarism would be a great advance upon government by absolute monarchy. The emperor, in spite of his natural repugnance, had to promise a constitution, and to allow his ministers ten years to draw it up, and his people the same length of time to make themselves worthy of it. During these ten years, the parliamentarism that was to be, won its spurs in the incoherent assemblies of the Great and General Council. But its history, its angry sessions, its manifold corruption, its unreasoning opposition to the minister of the moment-whoever he might happen, to be-its noisy mediocrity have made it, up to the present time, little more than an apish travesty of the European article. That the deputies should endeavor to obtain a responsible cabinet for the mere purpose of wantonly overthrowing it, is perhaps a natural idea, and one which might preclude the necessity of any other, were it not positively forced upon them by the fact that they are the representatives of the people who I have no need of being represented at all. The time will come, however, when the organ will have created the function! A work is going on among those masses, under the three-fold influence of old habits, foreign ideas and peculiar economic conditions, the importance of which is but dimly understood.

The imperial restoration--which was less a restoration, after all, than an innovation--was powerless to break the fatal laws that govern the Japanese mind. The annihilation of the samurai as a social order could not prevent those who took their places-that is to say, the indiscriminate multitudefrom falling into their time-honored mistakes. The samurai, supported by his prince in exchange for certain convenient services, yet quite independent of him, delivered from all the sordid anxieties and having only his own ad

vancement to seek, became in the course of ages of peace, the very type of the functionary. The prince gave place to the state, and men looked to the state for what they had formerly expected to get from the prince. All the Japanese would like to be functionaries; but no more now than in the past is it true that the power is really where it seems to reside. You seek for it in vain. It escapes you. You fancy you have detected it-and lo, the thing has vanished! The emperor is controlled by his ministers and does not really govern. Yet the ministers, who are in no wise responsible for their acts to Parliament, are, somehow, at his mercy. The officials whom they appoint hold office at the pleasure of their subordinates. The director of schools is removable at the request of the professors; the profes sor at that of his pupils. The selfsame man whom, when seated alone before his desk, you find full of confidence and sincerely desirous to serve you, will appear on the morrow-or maybe in the very next hour-when surrounded by his clerks and secretaries, hesitating, timorous, ready to evade all his promises. Orders are given, but whence do they emanate? They strike you as anonymous. The inferior has retained under the new régime all the complaisance and selfrestraint with which the old civilization had armed him against the perils of absolutism. Power in Japan comes from below.

But while in the old day respect for ancient forms and a strenuous tradition went far to correct the evils and dangers inseparable from the then condition of things, it is far otherwise to-day, when the spirit of individualism and a utilitarian morality have permeated the entire mass of the people. What was once only an artfully disguised instinct of self-preservation now asserts itself boldly as a

civic right. Authority, stripped of the nominal prestige on which it formerly subsisted, has become but a provisional phantom. The old belief in the divinity of the emperor-the vague belief of a people that never essays to define its faith, and in whom the religious sentiment would shrink from drawing that line between the divine and the human, which is less fluctuating than that between the animal and the plant-that ancient belief is paling and wavering under the cold light of European reason. It is no mere superstition which is thus doomed to die. It is the very principle of loyalty; for, in drawing up that constitution where the sovereign refers to his celestial origin for the authority to make proclamation in his empire of the Rights of Man, the politicians quite overlooked the fact that if in the incongruous union that they were solemnizing, Japanese mysticism seemed for a time to invalidate Occidental theories, the latter were certain in the end to discredit Japanese mysticism. The work of these legislators was essentially academic, and what they produced was a constitutional Henriade. And since the people understand none but living issues, they will very soon begin to neglect theory for expediency, and sacrifice at one fell swoop both the emperor and their reverence for his divinity to the care for their own human interests. The truth is that the Japanese respects nothing which is not shrouded in mystery. In the days when law was a something which fell like a thunderbolt out of an unexplored region, he wisely confined himself to the narrow round of his daily duties and never overstepped its limits. He lived in a little spot of light amid thick darkness. But now-a-days, when the laws may be inspected by any body, he discovers to his delight, that each one of them occupies but a single fixed point; that they may be gotten LIVING AGE. VOL. VIII. 428

round, evaded, saluted with nominal respect, but turned to one's own account. Laws have delivered him from the dominion of law.

Is he any happier for his emancipation? I do not think so. That unwritten law which he formerly obeyed has been transformed. There is no longer any question of obedience to a code whose rules are engraved upon the innermost conscience and their sanctions in the hands of the judges. To-day a man must live and work to live. And no longer, as formerly, does he work at stated hours, always tolerably sure of the future; but he must labor without intermission and with no great confidence in the morrow. The cost of living has prodigiously increased, and what never happened during the severe famines of the olden time when men were shut up within their own little province and saw the same dying pangs endured by all about them, has come to pass now. I mean that European enterprise and the economic revolution has wakened men to a consciousness of those social inequalities whose injustice or at least their seeming injustice-so cuts them to the heart; and the feeling is being constantly aggravated by the difference now so glaringly apparent, in a country where rich and poor once lived very much alike, between the wealthy speculator and the anxious wageearner. The old feudal communities are tending to become syndicates, and the first ominous mutterings of socialism are in the air.

The Chinese war-which was to my mind one of the most important events in Japanese history-hastened all these developments. Insignificant in itself— a sort of military parade, if you will, whose details the combatants had been arranging for some twenty years-it had consequences which went far beyond the expectations of the political chiefs. They saw in it the salvation

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of a constitution which was already menaced by parliamentary assault. But, what is of far deeper import, it gave to the new Japan the consecration of a heroic struggle-a sense of national pride. Enough has never been said in praise of the patriotism which fired all hearts from one end of the country to the other. It was a summons and a resurrection.

A resurrection of the old warlike traditions. The men of Japan found again their fortitude of the bygone time and the divine idea of country revived in a purified form the venerable worship of death. The military party came out of it more robust; and in spite of the persistent rivalries of the clans, it is the one thoroughly organized partythe only one which stands for the masses as a symbol of civic equalityand as such it is the party of the nation's hope.

The feeling of personal dignity awoke along with the consciousness of a common glory. The Japanese experienced the high joys of national solidarity. The Chinese battlefields rent away from the revolution, for one instant, its false ideology, and brought it home to the national heart. Men have ridiculed the vanity of the victorious Japanese and complained loudly of their arrogance. It has been said that the lowest of the people, servants, shopkeepers, artisans, kurumayas, have entertained ever since that time an intolerable conceit of themselves. The plebeian has been enrolled, and participates in the rise of Japan. It is as if he had been raised to the rank of samurai by retroactive legislation. He feels himself fully a man. His life has become more precious, and his rights more manifest.

Thus, then, as far as I am able to judge, the imperial restoration will result first in creating a wholly modern sentiment of national consciousness.

Personal loyalty will not be strengthened, but rather dissolved in a broader patriotism-less conducive, it may be, to the security of the country. And, secondly, in proportion as the European theories are found to contain precisely those anarchical tendencies which we have detected in the whole course of Japanese history, there will be a gradual growth among the masses of the revolutionary spirit. That populace whose action is and has ever been, a series of reactions, in which so many resigned souls continue to preserve, piously and without profit, the tradition of the old-time courtesy, and the prerogative of silent self-sacrifice that populace, I say, knows how to compass with a strange docility the painful subjugation of its own will. They are struggling-these Japanese masses-with an inheritance of servitude of which they had so long been unconscious that it had become almost instinctive. But their present rulers are harder upon them in the hour of emancipation than they ever were in that of tyranny. They are wrenching from them bonds which never galled, for the reason that they formed an essential part of their existence. Their deliverance has been a murderous one; and they are already beginning to refer what they suffer from the shackles. they still bear to the wounds they received when the others were removed.

The present psychological state of the Japanese nation is assuredly a disquieting one; so disquieting that the men in power will be forced ere long to apply the European panacea. And we shall yet witness the evolution of that disciple of parliamentarism, Itagaki, who has been called "the living god of Liberty," in the direction of state-socialism. Political centralization, consummated under the protection of the army, by means of an absolute monopoly of industries and schools, labor and intelligence, may re

sult in happiness for a people already appalled by its own attempts at emancipation. But I have an idea that the happiness of Japan is to be deferred a while longer.

On the very evening of the great festal day-after I had attempted with my mind still full of spectacular effects, to set in order some of my impressions both of the new Japan and of what I understood of its ancient history, I was crossing in company with a Japanese citizen some of the old feudal enclosures, and we fell into talk about the future of his country. The ruddy rays of the sinking sun streamed through the glades of the imperial park, and flung something like

Revue des Deux Mondes.

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a gigantic semblance of the Japanese flag across the ordinarily pallid sky.. My companion, who was a personage of distinction, waved his hand toward the unseen palace, on which the sun's eye seemed to linger, and said, with a certain accent of sadness rendered the deeper, somehow, by the visionary splendor of the scene.

"Japan will continue tranquil just so · long as that invisible dwelling shall shelter its present mysterious occu, pant. But I fear for my country on the day after his death."

And after a short pause he added:"Our people is easily governed only so long as power remains anonymous and impersonal. The thing I should dread above all others would be a too intelligent emperor."

André Bellesort.

THE FRIEND OF THE CREATURE.

From ancient times certain divine and human personages have been supposed to possess peculiar powers over shy and savage animals. Bacchus had a predilection for panthers. In the Pompeian collections at Naples there are several designs of Bacchus and his panther; one of them shows the panther and the ass of Silenus lying down together; in another, a very fine mosaic, the winged genius of Bacchus careers along, astride of his favorite beast; in a third a chubby little boy, with no signs of godhead about him, clambers on to the back of a patient panther, which has the long-suffering look of animals that are accustomed to be teased by children. It may be noticed that children and animals, both neglected in the older art, attained the highest popularity with artists of the age of Pompeii. Children were represented in all sorts of attitudes, and all known animals from the cat to the oc

topus and the elephant to the grasshopper were drawn, not only with general correctness, but with a keen insight into their humors and temperaments. The fondness of Bacchus for panthers is attributed to the fact that he wore a panther-skin, but there seems no motive for deciding that the one tradition was earlier than the. other. The rationale of a myth is often evolved long after the myth itself. Perhaps all the stories of gods and animals originated in the simple belief that gods, like men, had a weakness for pets.

Much more important than any of these stories are the closely allied legends of the power of Apollo and of Orpheus in taming beasts. In each case, the modus operandi was music.1 Like the greater part of myths, this

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