Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/33

 who feared for their own employment or fanatics who saw their superstitions slighted. Rapid as was the pace set by the leaders of progress, the masses did not hang back. That tribute at least must be paid to the nation's intelligent liberality by any honest writer of its modern history. We may deny that other peoples might not have done as well, but we can scarcely affirm that any would have done better. The only known instance of parallel opportunity was China, and to China, after a hundred years of scrutiny, the advantages of Occidental civilisation are still invisible.

Another point to be noted in analysing the causes of Japan's success is that many phases of her own civilisation were superior to the civilisation of the West when she began to assimilate the better parts of the latter. She did not bring to the examination of Occidental systems and their products a mind wholly untrained to distinguish the good from the bad. In her social conventionalisms, in her refinements of life, in her altruistic ethics, in many of her canons of domestic conduct, in her codes of polite etiquette, in her applications of art, she could have given to Europe lessons as useful as those she had to learn from it. That she should see the right quickly might have been anticipated. Then there was her ambition, an absorbing sentiment. Almost from the first moment when she looked out on the world which had so long been hidden