Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/277

Rh their old administrative machinery. From the trammels of such conservatism Japan shook herself finally free in 1867. The soundness of her instincts does not seem to have been impaired by long exile from international competition or by long lack of invigorating contact with foreign intellects. She knew the good when she saw it, and she chose it without racial prejudice or false shame. It is possible, of course, to set forth an imposing catalogue of achievements verifying these assertions; a catalogue of laws compiled, of judicial tribunals organised, of parliamentary institutions introduced, of railways built, of telegraphs erected, of postal services established, of industrial enterprises developed, of lines of steamers opened, of an educational system started of a newspaper press created, and so forth. There will be occasion presently to make special allusion to some of these things. But it is not to statistics that the reader's attention is invited here so much as to the broad fact that Japan has differentiated herself completely from "Oriental Nations" in the usually accepted sense of the term, and that her aspirations, her modes of thought, her impulses, her ideals, and her tests of conduct must now be classed, not altogether indeed but certainly in the main, as Occidental. She may be regarded as a Western nation situated on the confines of the Far East; a nation now, for the second time in its history, giving free play to the instincts of progress, of