asked the Diet to maintain the organization of
the army at the point to which it had been carried during the war,
and once more the lower house of the Diet proved very difficult to
persuade. Ultimately, however, the law of military service was
revised so that the fixed establishment became nineteen divisions,
together with various special corps. It is not possible to speak with
absolute accuracy of the force that Japan is now capable of
mobilizing, but when the new system is in full working order, she
will be able to put something like a million and a half of men into
the fighting line. Her military budget amounts to only seven millions
sterling--$35,000,000--a wonderfully small sum considering the
results obtained.

THE NAVY

It has been shown how, in the year 1636, the Bakufu Government
strictly interdicted the building of all vessels of ocean-going
capacity. The veto naturally precluded enterprise in the direction of
naval expansion, and when Commodore Perry, at the head of a powerful
squadron, arrived in Uraga Bay, two centuries afterwards, the
Japanese were suddenly and vividly instructed in the enormous power
of a nation wielding such weapons of war. This object lesson having
been most practically inculcated by the bombardments of Kagoshima and
Shimonoseki, Japan saw that she must not lose one moment in equipping
herself with a naval force. At first, she had to purchase all her
ships from foreign countries, and so difficult was it to obtain
parliamentary support for these acquisitions that, as already stated,
when war with the neighbouring empire broke out in 1894, she did not
possess a single ironclad, her strongest vessels being four
second-class cruisers, which, according to modern ideas, would not be
worthy of a place in the fighting line.

During the next ten years the teachings of experience took deeper
root, and when the great combat with Russia commenced, the Japanese
navy included four ironclads and six armoured cruisers. The signal
victories obtained by her in that war did not induce any sentiment of
self-complacency. She has gone on ever since increasing her navy, and
the present programme of her statesmen is that by the end of 1921,
she will possess twenty-five units of the first fighting line; that
figure being based on the principle that she should be competent to
encounter the greatest force which any foreign State, England
excluded, will be able to mass in Far Eastern waters ten years hence.
H