divided into two schools of thought, one believing implicitly in
Japan's _bona fides_, the other vulgarly covering her with abuse and
declaring that she is the last of all nations in her conceptions of fair
play and honourable treatment. Both views are far-fetched. It is as true
of Japan as it is of every other Government in the world that her
actions are dictated neither by altruism nor by perfidy, but are merely
the result of the faulty working of a number of fallible brains and as
regards the work of administration in Japan itself the position is
equally extraordinary. Here, at the extreme end of the world, so far
from being in any way threatened, the principle of Divine Right, which
is being denounced and dismembered in Europe as a crude survival from
almost heathen days, stands untouched and still exhibits itself in all
its pristine glory. A highly aristocratic Court, possessing one of the
most complicated and jealously protected hierarchies in the world, and
presided over by a monarch claiming direct descent from the sacred Jimmu
Tenno of twenty-five hundred years ago, decrees to-day precisely as
before, the elaborate ritual governing every move, every decision and
every agreement. There is something so engaging in this political
curiosity, something so far removed from the vast world-movement now
rolling fiercely to its conclusion, that we may be pardoned for
interpolating certain capital considerations which closely affect the
future of China and therefore cannot fail to be of public interest.

The Japanese, who owe their whole theocratic conception to the Chinese,
just as they owe all their letters and their learning to them, still
nominally look upon their ruler as the link between Heaven and Earth,
and the central fact dominating their cosmogony. Although the vast
number of well-educated men who to-day crowd the cities of Japan are
fully conscious of the bizarre nature of this belief in an age which has
turned its back on superstition, nothing has yet been done to modify it
because--and this is the important point--the structure of Japanese
society is such that without a violent upheaval which shall hurl the
military clan system irremediably to the ground, it is absolutely
impossible for human equality to be admitted and the man-god theory to
be destroyed. So long as these two features-exist; that is so long as a
privileged military caste supports and attempts to make all-powerful the
man-god theory, so long w