Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/29

 by extraneous causes, whereas the previous sanctions reflected Japan's natural disposition. She had always been liberal by instinct, though her mood had sometimes become conservative by education.

If these facts are recognised, her modern career becomes much more intelligible. Many onlookers have wondered that a nation should be able to spring suddenly out of an isolation which three centuries of observance had crystallised into a creed, and should suddenly embrace an alien civilisation not merely with avidity, but also with aptitude such as only a thoroughly liberal mood could beget. The truth is that these singular feats indicated, not a change of nature, but the re-assertion of an inborn disposition. For eighteen centuries she had been freely borrowing and assimilating everything that her Oriental neighbours had to offer, and when, in the middle of the nineteenth, she discovered that the Occident was incomparably a greater teacher, she merely obeyed her immemorial tendency of entering the newly opened school. But, it may be urged, though that accounts for her liberalism, it does not explain her receptivity. It tells us why she did not cling to her temporary conservatism, but it does not tell us why her progress became so rapid as to surprise the world. When an American squadron arrived to break down her isolation, she did not possess even the beginnings of a national fleet or a national army; of an ocean-going mercantile marine; of