Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/27

 nineteenth, Japan led an almost hermit existence. Of her own choice she closed her doors to all the nations of the Occident except the Dutch, and with them, too, her intercourse ultimately became an affair of haughty tolerance on one side and narrow privileges on the other. But if the world learned to regard her in those days as a semi-savage recluse, that was simply the world's misconception. Were the sentiments which, at the close of the nineteenth century, impel the United States and Australia to bar out the Chinese, and induce Russia and Germany to ostracise the Jews,—were those sentiments multiplied by factors of political apprehension and religious intolerance, they would still fall short of the feelings that Japan learned to cultivate towards Occidentals at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. Opening her ports to their traders more freely than any other contemporaneous nation would have done, she found them rapidly denude her of her gold and silver. Showing towards the preaching and propagandism of their religion an attitude of tolerance absolutely without precedent in mediæval days, she discovered that the alien creed became a political weapon pointed at the heart of her own national integrity and independence. Her instincts had prompted her to be liberal and receptive; her experience had compelled her to be conservative and repellent. We who see things assume their due proportions in the long vista of the past, know that