Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/44

 in America or England. Seventy per cent of the nation's school-age children receive instruction, yet the total sum annually expended on this education is not twice the yearly income of one of the great colleges of the United States. The aggregate capital invested in all the banks, industrial, commercial, insurance, shipping, and agricultural companies throughout the empire is less than the fortune of a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt. Many widow's mites are given to relieve distress, but the whole of the charitable and philanthropic donations made by private individuals during the thirty-two years of the Meiji era would look small by the side of a respectable Mansion House fund. So lilliputian are the dimensions of the market that a single speculation disturbs it. Consols are quoted, say at 95, but a purchase or sale of half a million dollars' worth would drive them up to 96 or more. The spirit of enterprise, stunted by this atmosphere of impecuniosity at home, naturally makes no excursions abroad. Railways wait in vain to be built by Japanese in Korea, new settlements to be colonised in China, large resources to be exploited in Formosa.

There remains, too, a disposition inherited from feudal times, a tendency to rely on official initiative and to shrink from every venture unaided by the State. Nearly all the material progress of the Meiji era has been led by the Government. Matters have greatly mended in that respect, but the writings of the vernacular