o be
"unclean," "dogs," "red-haired devils," we perhaps thought them to be
clever savages, or at best half-civilized heathen, without moral
perceptions or intellectual ability.

Of Old Japan little more needs to be said. Without external commerce,
there was little need for internal trade; ships were small; roads were
footpaths; education was limited to the samurai, or military class,
retainers of the daimyo, "feudal lords"; inter-clan travel was limited
and discouraged; Confucian ethics was the moral standard. From the
beginning of the seventeenth century Christianity was forbidden by
edict, and was popularly known as the "evil way"; Japan was thought to
be especially sacred, and the coming of foreigners was supposed to
pollute the land and to be the cause of physical evils. Education, as
in China, was limited to the Chinese classics. Mathematics, general
history, and science, in the modern sense, were of course wholly
unknown. Guns and powder were brought from the West in the sixteenth
century by Spaniards and Portuguese, but were never improved.
Ship-building was the same in the middle of the nineteenth century as
in the middle of the sixteenth, perhaps even less advanced.
Architecture had received its great impulse from the introduction of
Buddhism in the ninth and tenth centuries and had made no material
improvement thereafter.

But while there was little progress in the external and mechanical
elements of civilization, there was progress in other respects. During
the "great peace," first arose great scholars. Culture became more
general throughout the nation. Education was esteemed. The corrupt
lives of the priests were condemned and an effort was made to reform
life through the revival of a certain school of Confucian teachers
known as "Shin-Gaku"--"Heart-Knowledge." Art also made progress, both
pictorial and manual. It would almost seem as if modern artificers and
painters had lost the skill of their forefathers of one or two hundred
years ago.

Many reasons explain the continuance of the old political and social
order: the lack of a foreign foe to compel abandonment of the tribal
organisation; the mountainous nature of the country with its slow,
primitive means of intercommunication; the absence of all idea of a
completely centralized nation. Furthermore, the principle of complete
subordination to superiors and ancestors had become so strong that
individual innovations were practically impossible. Japan thus