Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/260

 dency to break up into coteries. These are the characteristics that render so perplexing to a foreign student the story of political evolution in Japan. He looks for differences of platform and finds none. Just as a true liberal must be a progressist, and a true progressist a liberal, so, though each may cast his profession of faith in a mould of different phrases, the ultimate shape must be the same. The mainsprings of early political agitation in Japan were personal grievances and a desire to wrest the administrative power from the hands of statesmen who had held it so long as to overtax the patience of their rivals. He that searches for profound moral or ethical bases will be disappointed. There were no conservatives. Society was permeated with the spirit of progress. In a comparative sense the epithet "conservative" might have been applied to the statesmen who proposed to defer parliamentary institutions until the people, as distinguished from the former samurai, had been in some measure prepared for such an innovation. But since these very statesmen were the guiding spirits of the whole Meiji revolution, it was plain that their convictions must be radical, and that, unless they did violence to their record, they must finally lead the country to representative institutions, the logical sequel of their own reforms.

Ōkubo's assassination in 1878 had been followed by an edict announcing the establishment