Tue foreign newspapers published in Japan are constantly filled with articles that throw light on the state of that country's march in the direction of rational liberty and free institutions, The Press Laws are felt by many Japanese, who have drank deeply of the stream of Western knowledge and imbibed many advanced Western ideas, to be an irksome and almost unbearable curb on the expression of opinion. We watch with very considerable interest the straggle that is going on, but we feel that in the main the Press Laws of 1875 were wise and right. When we say that a nation is not "fit for liberty," we make the remark with a wholesome dread of the time-honoured rejoinder, "that it is difficult to understand how a nation can be fit for anything else;" and yet, in fact, we are well aware that Japan is in a state of ferment and uncertainty which renders it a hazardous experiment to try and give' the country a free Press all at once. To find a reason for this we must go back to the old feudal times. When the Daimios wore dominating in Japan they gathered round them, as everyone knows, groups of sworders and swaggerers, who wore the crest of the great man and lived on his lavish bounty. They were "the rafers of the camp and court," and looked down with magnificent contempt upon the industrious hard-working classes. They had the rank of gentlemen, though they deserved the title as little as any class of men who ever bore it. They bad, as a writer in the Japan Mail well says, old instincts of idleness and arrogance."
The great change came. The power of the feudal princes was swept away at a stroke, and the swordsman who had been so ready to finger their blades and to vent their oaths found themselves abruptly without an occupation, The authority of the Mikado was established, andah was altered. Few persons were found to sympathise with the hangers-on of the grent nobles and they were in evil case. They could not dig, but they were not ashamed to beg. Ab last, however, they had to turn their hands to something, or at least those who had sons found that some work had to be
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.