o
a man whose object was reality, should have seemed an object worth
recording. These letters, so full and apparently so frank, really
so deceptive, are, as we have said, but one instance among many of
the way in which popular writers on Japan travesty history by
ignoring the part which foreigners have played. The reasons for
this are not far to seek. A wonderful tale will please folks at a
distance all the better if made more wonderful still. Japanese
progress, traced to its causes and explained by references to the
means employed, is not nearly such fascinating reading as when
represented in the guise of a fairy creation, sprung from nothing,
like Aladdin's palace."--"_Things Japanese," p. 116_.

But inter-racial misunderstanding is not, after all, so very strange.
Few things are more difficult than to accommodate one's self in
speech, in methods of life, and even in thought, to an alien people;
so identifying one's deepest interest with theirs as really to
understand them. The minds of most men are so possessed by notions
acquired in childhood and youth as to be unable to see even the
plainest facts at variance with those notions. He who comes to Japan
possessed with the idea that it is a dreamland and that its old social
order was free from defects, is blind to any important facts
invalidating that conception; while he who is persuaded that Japan,
being Oriental, is necessarily pagan at heart, however civilized in
form, cannot easily be persuaded that there is anything praiseworthy
in her old civilization, in her moral or religious life, or in any of
her customs.

If France fails in important respects to understand England; and
England, Germany; and Germany, its neighbors; if even England and
America can so misunderstand one another as to be on the verge of war
over the boundary dispute of an alien country, what hope is there that
the Occident shall understand the Orient, or the Orient the Occident?

Though the difficulty seems insurmountable, I am persuaded that the
most fruitful cause of racial misunderstandings and of defective
descriptions both of the West by Orientals, and of the East by
Occidentals, is a well-nigh universal misconception as to the nature
of man, and of society, and consequently of the laws determining their
development. In the East this error arises from and rests upon its
polytheism, and the accompanying theories of special national cr