s about the Mikado and the Grand
Council have theirs about the Ziogoon. And the cowardice engendered by
such ceaseless distrust necessarily leads to cruelty in penalties.
When an official has offended, or even when in his department there
has been any violation of law, although beyond his power of
prevention, so sure is he of the punishment of death, that he
anticipates it by ripping up his own body rather than be delivered
over to the executioner and entailing disgrace and ruin on all his
family. There cannot under such a system be anything like judicious
legislation founded on enquiry and adapted to the ever-varying
circumstances of life. As Government functionaries they lie and
practise artifice to save themselves from condemnation by the higher
powers: it is their vocation. As private gentlemen they are frank,
truthful, and hospitable."

Taking a further step and coming down to the year 1877, I have before
me, as I write, the private letter of a naval officer of an
impressionable age visiting Japan for the first time and giving his
opinions thereof, at a period when Japan was just beginning to feel
really at work the distinct influences of Western civilisation--the
beginning, in fact, of the extraordinary metamorphosis which has been
witnessed of recent years. He remarks: "Probably to the traveller
seeking the marvellous and desiring the beautiful, there is no more
interesting country to pay a visit to than Japan. In something under a
decade that country astonished, and, at first, rather amused the
civilised world by emerging from the acme of barbarism to the
extremes of civilisation. It was but a very few years ago that a
foreigner could not land in the country unless accompanied by a
Government escort. But now that is all changed. The foreigner is
welcomed, his habits and religion are not alone tolerated but
respected; his dress is copied to an extreme that indeed proves
imitation to be the sincerest flattery, and but for the olive
complexion, flat nose and dark hair, a Japanese gentleman of the
period is very little different from his English contemporary. There
is a tendency I find among a good many persons, whose ideas on the
subject of race and geography are slightly mixed, to confound the
Japanese with the Chinese, and to imagine that the two names indicate
no greater difference than at present exist between an Englishman and
an Irishman. The fact, however, is that a greater difference exists
among these tw