Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/266

 directed by Count (afterwards Marquis) Itō. He had visited the Occident for the purpose of investigating parliamentary institutions, studying their practical working and collecting from each whatever features seemed best adapted to the conditions existing in his own country. Ito Hirobumi's name is connected with nearly every great work of constructive statesmanship in the history of new Japan, and the crown of his legislative career was the drafting of the Constitution, a document conspicuously far-seeing in its occasional ambiguities, for it left time to interpret points which could not have been explicitly defined at the outset without provoking dangerous controversy. The Japanese point proudly to this Constitution as the only charter of its kind voluntarily given by a sovereign to his subjects. In other countries such concessions were always the outcome of long and often bloody struggles between ruler and ruled. In Japan the Emperor freely divested himself of a portion of his prerogatives and transferred them to the people. That view of the case, as will be perceived from the story told above, is not untinged with romance; but in a general sense it is true.

It will naturally occur to the reader of Japan's modern history to inquire what share the Emperor himself actually takes in the remarkable changes that signalise his reign. Japanese publicists refrain from discussing that question mi-