he has pointed out the
full reason for the difficulty of breaking the "cake of custom" or
manifested the real root of progress. To attain progress in the full
sense, not merely of an oligarchy or a caste, but of the whole people,
there must not only be government by discussion, but the
responsibilities of the government must be snared more or less fully
by all the governed.

History, however, shows that this cannot take place until a
conception of intrinsic manhood and womanhood has arisen, a conception
which emphasizes their infinite and inherent worth. This conception is
not produced by government by discussion, while government by
discussion is the necessary consequence of the wide acceptance of this
conception. It is therefore the real root of progress.

As I look over the history of the Orient, I find no tendency to
discover the inherent worth of man or to introduce the principle of
government by discussion. Left to themselves, I see no probability
that any of these nations would ever have been able to break the
thrall of their customs, and to reach that stage of development in
which common individuals could be trusted with a large measure of
individual liberty. Though I can conceive that Japan might have
secured a thorough-going political centralization under the old
_regime_, I cannot see that that centralization would have been
accompanied by growing liberty for the individual or by such
constitutional rights for the common man as he enjoys to-day. Whatever
progress she might have made in the direction of nationality it would
still have been a despotism. The common man would have remained a
helpless and hopeless slave. Art might have prospered; the people
might have remained simple-minded and relatively contented. But they
could not have attained that freedom and richness of life, that
personality, which we saw in our last chapter to be the criterion and
goal of true progress.

If the reader judges the above contention correct and agrees with the
writer that the conception of the inherent value of a human being
could not arise spontaneously in Japan, he will conclude that the
progress of Japan depended on securing this important conception from
without. Exactly this has taken place. By her thorough-going
abandonment of the feudal social order and adoption of the
constitutional and representative government of Christendom, whether
she recognizes it or not, she has accepted the principles of the
inherent wort