s childishly
untruthful, fungoid in the swiftness of its growth, and pitiable in its
unseasoned rashness. Backers of this press in its wilder moments,
lawless, ignorant, sensitive and vain, are the student class, educated
in the main at Government expense, and a thorn in the side of the State.
Judges without training handle laws without precedents, and new measures
are passed and abandoned with almost inconceivable levity. Out of the
welter of classes and interests that are not those of the common folk is
evolved the thing called Japanese policy that has the proportion and the
perspective of a Japanese picture.

Finality and stability are absent from its councils. To-day, for reasons
none can explain, it is pro-foreign to the verge of servility.
To-morrow, for reasons equally obscure, the pendulum swings back,
and--the students are heaving mud at the foreigners in the streets.
Vexatious, irresponsible, incoherent, and, above all, cheaply
mysterious, is the rule of the land--stultified by intrigue and
counter-intrigue, chequered with futile reforms begun on European lines
and light-heartedly thrown aside; studded, as a bower-bird's run is
studded with shells and shining pebbles, with plagiarisms from half the
world--an operetta of administration, wherein the shadow of the King
among his wives, Samurai policemen, doctors who have studied under
Pasteur, kid-gloved cavalry officers from St. Cyr, judges with
University degrees, harlots with fiddles, newspaper correspondents,
masters of the ancient ceremonies of the land, paid members of the Diet,
secret societies that borrow the knife and the dynamite of the Irish,
sons of dispossessed Daimios returned from Europe and waiting for what
may turn up, with ministers of the syndicate who have wrenched Japan
from her repose of twenty years ago, circle, flicker, shift, and reform,
in bewildering rings, round the foreign resident. Is the extravaganza
complete?

Somewhere in the background of the stage are the people of the land--of
whom a very limited proportion enjoy the privileges of representative
government. Whether in the past few years they have learned what the
thing means, or, learning, have the least intention of making any use of
it, is not clear. Meantime, the game of government goes forward as
merrily as a game of puss-in-the-corner, with the additional joy that
not more than half-a-dozen men know who is controlling it or what in
the wide world it intends to do. In Tok