MORE OCCIDENTAL VENEER

Although Japan's latest franchise law, just promulgated, barks back to the nineteenth century, the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867, and the plebiscites of Napoleon III, it serves as a reminder that Japan still copies. She now has most of Europe's political features, a constitution, militarism, world-wide diplomacy, and universal suffrage. She has amply proved her descriptive trilogy, "adept, adopt, adapt."

Westerners usually regard the wholesale acceptance of western ways as progress. To conservative Orientals it must seem no less than retrogressive, if not irreligious. The changes obviously result from European contacts; but whether they will ever be more than superficial results of superficial contests, is a matter of some doubt.

Torn open by capitalism in search of markets, Japan was strong enough to retaliate in kind. But, because she possesses vitality, she is non the less a blossom of the East. Her people may enshroud a mystic temper and a love of occult ritualism with the paraphernalia of foreign trade; it is but in self-defense: she smells of sandalwood still. Her cults her shrines, her potentates, her very homes and villages, are only curious mysteries to Caucasian eyes. Yet theirs are roots before which the Christian faith is a seedling. There is no power in intercourse with the west that can transcend this Oriental inheritance.

The cultural heritage of the new Japan is identical with that of the old, Europe has played the unsuccessful alchemist, in stirring things up without changing their nature. Japan, with her numbers and her new activity, must now attract the social student, as a portent rather than a prey.

There is significance in Russia's recent overtures to the Mikado's government. It is an old saying, "Scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tartar." And why is it not natural that Japan should seek her place among nations through "the most eastern of Europeans and the most western of Asiatics.?"