lacked
the indispensable key to further progress, the principle of
individualism. The final step in the development of her nationality
has been taken, therefore, only in our own time.

Old Japan seemed absolutely committed to a thorough-going antagonism
to everything foreign. New Japan seems committed to the opposite
policy. What are the steps by which she has effected this apparent
national reversal of attitude?

We should first note that the absolutism of the Tokugawa Shogunate
served to arouse ever-growing opposition because of its stern
repression of individual opinion. It not only forbade the Christian
religion, but also all independent thought in religious philosophy and
in politics. The particular form of Confucian moral philosophy which
it held was forced on all public teachers of Confucianism. Dissent was
not only heretical, but treasonable. Although, by its military
absolutism, the Tokugawa rule secured the great blessing of peace,
lasting over two hundred years, and although the curse of Japan for
well-nigh a thousand preceding years had been fierce inter-tribal and
inter-family wars and feuds, yet it secured that peace at the expense
of individual liberty of thought and act. It thus gradually aroused
against itself the opposition of many able minds. The enforced peace
rendered it possible for these men to devote themselves to problems of
thought and of history. Indeed, they had no other outlet for their
energies. As they studied the history of the past and compared their
results with the facts of the present, it gradually dawned on the
minds of the scholars of the eighteenth century, that the Tokugawa
family were exercising functions of government which had never been
delegated to them; and that the Emperor was a poverty-stricken puppet
in the hands of a family that had seized the military power and had
gradually absorbed all the active functions of government, together
with its revenues.

It is possible for us to see now that these early Japanese scholars
idealized their ancient history, and assigned to the Emperor a place
in ancient times which in all probability he has seldom held. But,
however that may be, they thought their view correct, and held that
the Emperor was being deprived of his rightful rule by the Tokugawa
family.

These ideas, first formulated in secret by scholars, gradually
filtered down, still in secrecy, and were accepted by a large number
of the samurai, the military literati of