It must be extremely pleasant to. be hoisted into the position of an editorial writer in the Times, because not almost. anything, but anything at all that appears in its columns is covered by the shadow of 'a great name. But. we do not think that any paper, no matter what weight its name may carry, can go on for ever feeding on the laurels of the past, and it seems to us that the Times has been doing that for some years now. Its columns, moreover, -have been at by people who had axes to grind, either their own, or those of their employers, or both, so that its editorial omniscience, even if we do not question its motives, has laid itself open to suspicion. In Japan its correspondents have been and ore in Japanese employ, 80 that: they received pay for the exposition of their partisan views at both ends, and we think it would be doing an injustice to the management of the Times to' assume that it was ignorant of the fact, If it were, however,-we think its. suspicions should have been aroused by the. peculiar and suggestive fact that its correspondents were so frequently, if not almost invariably, at variance with the independent foreign Press of Japan, some of whose conductors, ourselves amongst them, have seen a generation grow up in the country, and who may reasonably. be supposed to be immeasurably better informed upon Japanese affairs than a writer on the Times who obtains his information from tainted sources. We shall waste no time and space therefore in reproducing all that the sage of the Times has to say on foreign journals in Japan, but shall limit our'remarks to a few of the principal points.
"Foreign local journals in Japan," we learn, have been thrown into a state of much excitement by an imaginary discovery that the Japanese Government's recovery of judicial autonomy will be the signal for depriving aliens of the privilege publishing newspapers." "Next, we are condescendingly instructed in the art of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.