reditary. Its dignitaries remind one vividly of
English Archdeacons.

The Japanese, even when they adopt industrial methods, do not lose their
sense of beauty. One hears complaints that their goods are shoddy, but
they have a remarkable power of adapting artistic taste to
industrialism. If Japan were rich it might produce cities as beautiful
as Venice, by methods as modern as those of New York. Industrialism has
hitherto brought with it elsewhere a rising tide of ugliness, and any
nation which can show us how to make this tide recede deserves our
gratitude.

The Japanese are earnest, passionate, strong-willed, amazingly hard
working, and capable of boundless sacrifice to an ideal. Most of them
have the correlative defects: lack of humour, cruelty, intolerance, and
incapacity for free thought. But these defects are by no means
universal; one meets among them a certain number of men and women of
quite extraordinary excellence. And there is in their civilization as a
whole a degree of vigour and determination which commands the highest
respect.

The growth of industrialism in Japan has brought with it the growth of
Socialism and the Labour movement.[90] In China, the intellectuals are
often theoretical Socialists, but in the absence of Labour
organizations there is as yet little room for more than theory. In
Japan, Trade Unionism has made considerable advances, and every variety
of socialist and anarchist opinion is vigorously represented. In time,
if Japan becomes increasingly industrial, Socialism may become a
political force; as yet, I do not think it is. Japanese Socialists
resemble those of other countries, in that they do not share the
national superstitions. They are much persecuted by the Government, but
not so much as Socialists in America--so at least I am informed by an
American who is in a position to judge.

The real power is still in the hands of certain aristocratic families.
By the constitution, the Ministers of War and Marine are directly
responsible to the Mikado, not to the Diet or the Prime Minister. They
therefore can and do persist in policies which are disliked by the
Foreign Office. For example, if the Foreign Office were to promise the
evacuation of Vladivostok, the War Office might nevertheless decide to
keep the soldiers there, and there would be no constitutional remedy.
Some part, at least, of what appears as Japanese bad faith is explicable
in this way. There is of course a party which wi