Tux great event of the present month, in Inpan, bes been the formal opening by the Mikado of the Kioto and Osaka railway; and nothing could exhibit more forcibly the immense change that has been lately brought about in that country, than the personal participation of the Sovereign in such a ceremony. It is barely eighteen years since Lord Elgin arrived in Japan to find a Ruler whom men called the Tycoon, in power. at Yeddo, one who so completely monopolised the functions and external attributes of Government, that the very existence of a higher Power was not suspected, till circumstances disclosed the inefficiency of the Tycoon's control over the feudal princes of territories remote from his capital. For nearly three hundred years the Mikados had been secluded in their ancient capital of Kioto, exercising apparently none of the functions of Government, and regarded apparently more as semidivine abstractions than as human Rulers. Within this comparatively short time, the usurped power of the maires clu palais has been overthrown, the feudal system has disappeared, and the roi faniéant has come forth from his obscurity to resume the active functions of Government from which his ancestors were practically deposed by Tyeyas, A nation which lived in a seclusion more rigorous even than that of China, and would tolerate no foreigner on its soil, has remodelled its Government on the Western system, and embraced almost with over-haste and eagerness every appliance which the scientific skill 6f Western nations had devised. As the Hiogo News remarks, in commenting on the recent proceedings, it is only by a study of Japanese tory during the last eighteen years it is only by re-perusal of Mr. Oliphant's account of Lord Elgin's mission in 1860 and the later narrative of Sir Rutherford Alcock, that we can appreciate what the ceremony of the 5th February really meant. Remembering what Japan was; remem. bering the position the Mikado held, as one may say only the day before yesterday, it seems almost in credible that we should find bim receiving and replying to Chairmen of Municipalities, receiving addresses from Foreign Consuls, and figuring in such a ceremony as the opening of a railway, freely before the eyes of all his people. While the Emperor of China, still secludes himself in the recesses of the Sacred City, and his Ministers strive to maintain the old fallacies of Government which have kept the people in poverty and the cities in squalor and filth—the Mikado of Japan has thrown off the affectation of reserve and inapproachableness; travels freely through his dominions to show him." self to his people; takes, nominally at least, an active share in the duties of Government; entertains the Envoys of foreign Powers with the courtesy due to representatives of equal nations; and encourages by such ceremonies as that at Kioto," the adoption of those appliances which "have contributed to make those nations
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.