d instruction as to how best to
perform the duties of the home. These magazines are for the most part
written and edited by men, many of them very young men, and serve to
show rather what men desire that women should think and do, than to give
any insight into the minds of the women themselves. With a combined
circulation of perhaps 40,000, they enter many homes, and do something,
at least, toward the general enlightening and quickening of the feminine
mind that is so noticeable in the Japan of to-day. In regard to the
general reading of Japanese women who have had the new education, my
own observation leads me to believe that they keep themselves well
informed of what is going on in their own country, and of the outside
world so far as it affects their own country; but that their interest in
the world at large is less than that of American women, and only in
exceptional cases do they care much for the sayings or doings of
foreigners. In this respect they differ widely from the men, whose minds
are reaching continually for new things to graft upon the old
civilization.

In the whole list of publications on the woman question, nothing has
ever come out in Japan that compares for outspokenness and radical
sentiments with a book published within a year or two by Mr. Fukuzawa,
the most influential teacher that Japan has seen in this era of
enlightenment. It is in two parts, the first an attack, conducted with
much skill and humor, upon Kaibara's "Great Learning of Woman," a book
which for nearly four hundred years has been supposed to contain all
that a woman should know. The last part of Mr. Fukuzawa's work is a
constructive essay upon the "New Great Learning of Woman." So
revolutionary are the sentiments expressed in the book that many
Japanese men hesitate about allowing their wives and daughters to read
it, and in at least one modern Christian school it has been ruled out
from the school library as too advanced for the reading of the girls. A
brief survey of the sentiments and ideas thus boldly set forth will show
how far is the attitude of the Japanese from that of the American public
on the woman question. We find in Mr. Fukuzawa's book the lofty ideal
that belongs to the most advanced modern thought, but its promulgation
as a practical working ideal in Japan was of the nature of a
thunderclap. Among less tolerant races, men have been lynched, or burned
at the stake, for slighter departures from the average code of th