Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/131

 no mood could have been more serviceable to the Japanese in their modern career. It has helped them to adapt themselves docilely to changes which must otherwise have provoked vehement revolt, and it has presided beneficially over the arena of party politics and commercial competition, so that when foreign observers looked confidently for a crisis in the former or a catastrophe in the latter, the result was always adjustment and compromise. How much is lost in other directions owing to the weakness of moral fibre inseparable from such a disposition, it is extremely difficult to estimate. There must be some deficiency of strenuousness and tenacity, and indeed Japanese enterprise often seems to flag on the threshold of attainment. Yet in the other side of the scale there is patience almost unlimited and there is the profoundest faith in time. Where a goal might be quickly reached by resolute vehemence at the cost of a collision, the Japanese reaches it smoothly by slow insistence. He is discovered to have been waiting at his post when he was supposed to have abandoned the field altogether.

The Japanese themselves ascribe their love of compromise and conciliation largely to the code of social courtesy. It is a breach of politeness to be self-assertive; to thrust one's own rights into the sphere of a neighbour's; to disturb the graceful placidity of life by egoistic claims of any kind, or to obtrude distressful subjects upon the