Sept. 20.
Or all that has been written about the late General Nogi's death, nothing is so touching as the words in which he excused himself from attendance on Prince Arthur of Connaught ''because he was going in the suite of the Emperor."' That the Prince should have taken these words as referring to the living, and not the dead, Emperor, can occasion no surprise. It may be doubted whether even among the Japanese anyone would have seen in General Nogi's words aught but the obvious meaning. So much, it may be thought, for Westernizing influence in Japan. At the first reception of the news there appeared something almost grotesque in the horror of the deed. With this, it must be confessed, would come a feeling of pity that any man capable of such an act, and especially a dis tinguished soldier such as General Nogi, should be lost to his country in such a way. But these feelings were quickly merge ed in one of admiration for the utter self-effacement of the General and his Countess before the one supreme ideal of absolute devotion to the Emperor. The spirit of the age has gone fur to obliterate the sense of the divinity that doth hedge a king. And here, in spite of the tremendous moral and material changes that had transformed their ni, Were & man and woman, who had no use for their lives but as they might serve their Emperor. He was gone; they would follow in his suite. Of such men truly was Japan's grandeur built. It remains to see how many are left of the same fibre.
That, or something like it, is the question which inspires extraordinarily interesting and instructive article by the—Tokio correspondent of The Times," entitled The Spiritual Problem of Japan." It is easy enough, he says, in reviewing the reign of the late Emperor to contrast
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.