'A French wireless message, dated the 13th, says that Mr. J. W. Gerard, former American Ambassador at Berlin and author of that remarkable book My Four Years in Germany," has written a new book entitled "My Mission in Japan," on which he discusses Japan's effort to bridge the gulf between Eastern and Western culture. There is certainly room for a new book on Japan, which continues to display the meteoric development that has landed her in something like half a century out of medievalism into the ranks of the first class Powers. One of the best books, as a record of minute investigation that we have read about Japan for a long time, is Mr. Frederic _Coleman's "The Far East Unveiled." But the sum total is rather depressing. Industrialism, sweated labour, the nankin with his vast fortunes and purse pride—these are all true charges against modern Japan; and the appeal in the Emperors peace rescript for a return to frugality and simplicity is significant enough. But there is something more behind all this. The demand for universal suffrage, which is endorsed by papers which one would hardly expect to take such an attitude, points to new conceptions of popular right and of democratic aspirations. The Japanese often complain that they are misjudged abroad: which is probably quite true though not precisely as they mean it They are undoubtedly often their own worst enemies. But in spite of much that is, and is bound to be, antipathetic to outsiders there are new and
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.