Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/32

 does, breech-loaders, machine guns, and iron-clads revolutionised warfare, carriages were propelled by electricity, and men travelled at the rate of thirty miles an hour on machines which could not stand upright at rest,—would not the display have revolutionised England? Yet this catalogue of wonders has to be largely extended before it covers the exhibition by which Japan was dazzled forty years ago. No wonder that she stretched out eager hands to grasp such an array of novelties.

If that were all she had done, it might not be fair to say that any intelligent people would have acted with less vigour under similar circumstances. But Japan did not confine herself to adopting the externals of Western civilisation. She became an eager pupil of its scientific, political, moral, philosophic, and legislative systems also. She took the spirit as well as the letter, and by so doing differentiated herself effectively from Oriental States. It has been objected that this wholesale receptivity was limited to a few leaders of thought,—to the literati and the military patricians whose will had always been law to the commoners. Certainly that is true as to the initiative. But it is unimaginable that such sweeping changes could have been effected in a quiet and orderly manner had not the hearts of the people been with the reformers. In Japan no railways were torn up, no machines wrecked, no lines of telegraph demolished by labourers