Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/276

Rh gating ships, organising and equipping armies and manufacturing and utilising weapons of war, they might again close the treaty ports and revert to the old isolation, they soon perceived that there is no element of finality in civilisation, and that to turn their backs upon the Occident after brief acquaintance would be to fall behind it again in the race of progress and become as impotent as ever to resist alien aggression or dictation.

There will never again be in Japan, so far as human judgment can discern, any effective reaction against Occidental civilisation or Occidental intercourse. In fact, it may be asserted that from the day when the Shogunate fell, Japan ceased to be an Oriental nation. The term Oriental" is not used here in a disparaging sense. So far as Japan is concerned, the reader of these pages knows that she possessed a civilisation of her own; a refined, elaborate, and highly developed civilisation, many phases of which suffer nothing, if indeed they do not gain, by comparison with the civilisation of the foremost Western nations. Therefore this epithet "Oriental" is employed with reference solely to the conservatism which has come to be regarded as a distinctive feature of East-Asian peoples; the conservatism that makes them cling to their old institutions, their old methods, their old laws, their old judicial procedure, their old means of communication, their old social organisations, and