A slight retrospect
will, I think, clearly prove the truth of this assertion.

It is now about fifty years since Japan was first awakened, perhaps
rudely awakened, from her slumber of two and a half centuries. When
the European Powers and the United States of America knocked, perhaps
somewhat rudely, at her door, it turned slowly on its hinges and
creaked owing to the rust of many long years. How came it that a
country which had imported its art, literature, religion, and
civilisation, a country which until 1868 had a mediaeval feudalism for
its social basis, a country which until then was notorious for the
practice of hara-kiri and the fierceness of its two-sworded Samurai
should so suddenly take on Western attributes and become a seat of
liberty and the exponent of Western civilisation in the Far East? All
this is to some persons a rather perplexing problem. But the reasons
are not, I think, far to seek. If we go back many centuries we shall
find that Japan, though always tenacious of her national
characteristics, never evinced any indisposition to mingle with or
adopt what was good in other races. The national character for many
hundreds of years has always displayed what I may term the germs of
liberalism, and has not been influenced by narrow and petty national
ideals concerning the customs, religion, art, or literature of other
countries. As against this statement may be urged the action of Japan
in expelling the Portuguese missionaries, destroying thoroughly
Christianity, both buildings and converts, and effectually and
effectively shutting the country against all intercourse with Europe
and America for over two centuries. The answer of the Japanese of
to-day to this question is simple enough. They point out that,
although the object of St. Francis Xavier and his missionaries was
essentially spiritual, viz., to convert Japan to Christianity, that of
many of the foreigners who accompanied or succeeded him was not in any
sense spiritual, but on the contrary was grossly and wickedly
material. Accordingly Japan, having rightly or wrongly concluded that
not only her civilisation but her national life, her independent
existence, were menaced by the presence and the increasing number of
these foreigners, she decided, on the principle that desperate
diseases require desperate remedies, to expel them and to effectually
seal her country against any possibility of future foreign invasions.
I am not, I may remark, defendin