Yeo. Tt is pleasant to turn from a record of stolid immobility, to one of active progress. While China clings blindly to its semi-civilisation, under a failing dynasty and corrupt officials, Japan is making vigorous efforts to renew her national life, and to overtake the more advanced nations of the West. While China falls back on the maxims of a thousand ages, and sees horror and ruin novation, the princes of Japan are devising change after change, in order, as they declare, that "the Empire shall be able to take its place side by side with the other countries of the world," and "that their amall country of Jupan may enter into fellowship with the nations beyond the sea," a fellowship too—unlike the relationship which China desires,—both intelligent.and possible. China—really inferior to Western powers in almost every resp-ct—tries to assume the pos tion of a superior, and repels every advantage she might derive from contact with their higher knowledge. Japan frankly acknowledges her backwardness, strives almost hurriedly to adopt every appliance of Western civilisation in which she sees she is deficient, and conciliates the respect and hearty aid of her Foreign allies. If a Chinese Oficial lays bare, in a memorial, the prevailing flaws and corruption of ce-Iestial institutions, he is either snubbed or put off with an unctions platitude. But Japan has completed, in eighteen months, a revolution founded on liberal principles, in which examples have been given of enlightened and patriotic self-abnegation, and which promises to lead to rapid progress. It was not, as similar movements have been in Europe, an upheaving of the people, but a movement of their chiefs. It was an onto break of discontent at the rule of the Tycoon; bat an out-break stimulated by Foreign intercourse, and leading to the adoption of many foreign views. Judged by its result, the movement must command the sympathy of Western nations, and should, by the contrast it affords to the sulky stolidity of China, aid Home politicians to guage more accurately the degree of enlighternment with which Celestial officials deserve to be credited.
While the ruling 3 of China are repelling foreign intercourse' because it deranges their prejudices, interferes with their extortions, and threatens their power by tending to enlighten the masses; we find the Princes of Japan offering to abandon their feudal rights, to give up their lands and revennes to strengthen the Central power, and their troops and ships to form an imperial army and navy, Itis true, di ficulties have occurred in carrying the design into execution, which have temporarily hindered it; but the fact remains, that the movement was made; and we desire to show the active, liberal, and progressive spirit in which Japan seeks to deal with her difficulties. Almost simultaneously with this effort to translate their feudal syatem into an aristocracy based on the European model, her nobles endeavouted to copy, also, Western representative assemblies; and a parliament compris sing 276 members actually held several meetings. It is true, it lacked the es sential value of Western parliaments, in that it comprised no representatives of the people. It was essentially a House of Lords; bat a representative popular assembly is not an institution that' can be created in a day, out of a aystem of feudal despotism; it is only by experience of freedom, and exercise of thought, that men become fit to discuss and it fluence political problems. Even the Ji panese patricians fall short of the high standard aimed at; and it is likely that, to have assembled representatives of the plebs, would have been to have created a mixture of incompetence and servility. The fault with Japan is, not that she stops short, bat that she goes too fast. The Japanese have been 60 long in darkness, that they naturally err in the flood of light so suddenly let in upon their seclusion.
Bat, to quote a recent able essay in the Japan Times, there is nothing rich calous, while there is much to admire, in their efforts, "Their patriotism grasps at everything it sees, in the Wostern nations it so long and so jealously excluded from its home, which has given them power or wealth; and seeks to incorporate these elements into the polity of the country, that she may become as powerfal and wealthy as they. But superficiality and instability are equally prominent as vices of the Ja-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.