ons or their civilization, they themselves must
fade away before the stronger nations. The need of self-preservation
was the first great stimulus that drove new thoughts into unwilling
brains.

There can be no doubt that the Japanese were right in this analysis of
the situation. Had they insisted on maintaining their old methods of
national life and social order and ancient customs, there can be no
doubt as to the result. Africa and India in recent decades and China
and Korea in the most recent years tell the story all too clearly.
Those who know the course of treaty conferences and armed collisions,
as at Shimonoseki and Kagoshima between Japan and the foreign nations,
have no doubt that Japan, divided into clans and persisting in her
love of feudalism, would long since have become the territory of some
European Power. She was saved by the possession of a remarkable
combination of national characteristics,--the powers of observation,
of appreciation, and of imitation. In a word, her sensitiveness to her
environment and her readiness to respond to it proved to be her
salvation.

But the point on which I wish to lay special emphasis is that the
prime element of the form in which the deliverance came was through
the acquisition of numerous new ideas. These were presented by persons
who thoroughly believed in them and who admittedly had a power not
possessed by the Japanese themselves. Though unable to originate these
ideas, the Japanese yet proved themselves capable of understanding and
appreciating them--in a measure at least. They were at first attracted
to that which related chiefly to the externals of civilization, to
that which would contribute immediately to the complete political
centralization of the nation. With great rapidity they adopted Western
ideas about warfare and weapons. They sent their young men abroad to
study the civilization of the foreign nations. At great expense they
also employed many foreigners to teach them in their own land the
things they wished to learn. Thus have the Japanese mastered so
rapidly the details of those ideas which, less than fifty years ago,
were not only strange but odious to them.

Under their influence, the conditions which history shows to be the
most conducive to the continuous growth of civilization have been
definitely accepted and adopted by the people, namely, popular rights,
the liberty of individuals to differ from the past so far as this does
not interfere with