What makes the work peculiarly difficult in Japan is the fact that owing to the death, among other great statesmen, of what I may call the Middle Aged School, of Count Mutsu and Viscount Mori, a big gap of from fifteen to twenty years divides the recognised leaders—Ito, Okuma, Inouye and the like—from their pro-' spective successors,—Baron Ito, Baron Suyematsu, Mr. Takoaki Kato, Mr. Ken-taro Kaneko, Mr. Keiroku Tenzuki, ete.
The elder statesmen are therefore prone asarule to regard the men who must mentally displace them as boys and to troat them as such; and, as a man who is treated as a hoy until he is gray-headed is not likely to ever act as a man, the state of things in the Japanese political world was not promising.
Marquis Ito has, however, changed all that or at least begun the change. He is} the dens ex machine, the old man with a9 young heart whom the Sage of Mito has so often called upon to come forth; and his appointnient of young men like Messrs. Kato and Toru to important posts shows that he is bent on bringing about that "smooth transition" from old to young of which Japanese publicists are so fond of talking.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.