erica, or any land less subject to waves of emotion. So far as I
could learn, the nation was a unit in regard to the war. There was not
the slightest sign of a "peace party." Of all the Japanese with whom I
talked only one ever expressed the slightest opposition to the war,
and he on religious grounds, being a Quaker.

The strength of the emotional element tends to make the Japanese
extremists. If liberals, they are extremely liberal; if conservative,
they are extremely conservative. The craze for foreign goods and
customs which prevailed for several years in the early eighties was
replaced by an almost equally strong aversion to anything foreign.

This tendency to swing to extremes has cropped out not infrequently in
the theological thinking of Japanese Christians. Men who for years
had done effective work in upbuilding the Church, men who had lifted
hundreds of their fellow-countrymen out of moral and religious
darkness into light and life, have suddenly, as it has appeared, lost
all appreciation of the truths they had been teaching and have swung
off to the limits of a radical rationalism, losing with their
evangelical faith their power of helping their fellow-men, and in some
few cases, going over into lives of open sin. The intellectual reasons
given by them to account for their changes have seemed insufficient;
it will be found that the real explanation of these changes is to be
sought not in their intellectual, but in their emotional natures.

Care must be taken, however, not to over-emphasize this extremist
tendency. In some respects, I am convinced that it is more apparent
than real. The appearance is due to the silent passivity even of those
who are really opposed to the new departure. It is natural that the
advocates of some new policy should be enthusiastic and noisy. To give
the impression to an outsider that the new enthusiasm is universal,
those who do not share it have simply to keep quiet. This takes place
to some degree in every land, but particularly so in Japan. The
silence of their dissent is one of the striking characteristics of the
Japanese. It seems to be connected with an abdication of personal
responsibility. How often in the experience of the missionary it has
happened that his first knowledge of friction in a church, wholly
independent and self-supporting and having its own native pastor, is
the silent withdrawal of certain members from their customary places
of worship. On inquiry it is l