y on important themes of national
policy, the relation of religion and politics, the relation of Japan
to the Occident and the Orient, than could be found in either of the
two colleges in the United States with which I was connected. I do not
say that they could bring forth original ideas on these topics. But
they could at least remember what they had heard and read and could
reproduce the ideas with amazing fluency.

A recent public meeting in Tokyo in which Christian students of the
University spoke to fellow-students on the great problems of religion,
revealed a power of no mean order in handling the peculiar
difficulties encountered by educated young men. A competent listener,
recently graduated from an American university and widely acquainted
with American students, declared that those Japanese speakers revealed
greater powers of mind and speech than would be found under similar
circumstances in the United States.

The fluency with which timid girls pray in public has often surprised
me. Once started, they never seem to hesitate for ideas or words. The
same girls would hardly be able to utter an intelligible sentence in
reply to questions put to them by the pastor or the missionary, so
faint would be their voices and so hesitating their manner.

The question as to whether the Japanese have powers of generalization
receives some light from a study of the language of the people. An
examination of primitive Japanese proves that the race, prior to
receiving even the slightest influence from China, had developed
highly generalized terms. It is worth while to call attention here to
a simple fact which most writers seem to ignore, namely, that all
language denotes and indeed rests on generalization. Consider the word
"uma," "horse"; this is a name for a whole class of objects, and is
therefore the product of a mind that can generalize and express its
generalization in a concept which no act of the imagination can
picture; the imagination can represent only individuals; the mind that
has concepts of classes of things, as, for instance, of horses,
houses, men, women, trees, has already a genuine power of
generalization. Let me also call attention to such words as "wake,"
"reason"; "mono," "thing"; "koto," "fact"; "aru," "is"; "oro,"
"lives"; "aru koto," "is fact," or "existence"; "ugoku koto,"
"movement"; "omoi," "thought"; this list might be indefinitely
extended. Let the reader consider whether these words are not hig