Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/125

 is ex-officio president, and the councillors are partly elective, partly nominated by the Central Government. The councils may be said to stand in an executive position towards the local legislatures, namely, the assemblies, for the former give effect to the measures voted by the latter, take their place in case of emergency and consider questions submitted by them. This system of local government has now been in operation for fifteen years, and has been found to work well. It constitutes a thorough method of political education for the people, since the local assemblies — prefectural, county, town, and district — aggregate no less than 15,492 throughout the Empire. The general plan is Japanese, and the details have much in common with the old-time organisation familiar to the people, but in elaborating the scheme considerable assistance was obtained from German experts.

The work of railway building was commenced by the Meiji Government in 1869, and the first line — that between Tōkyō and Yokohama, a distance of eighteen miles — was opened for traffic in 1872. But private capitalists showed no inclination to engage in such enterprise, and when at length in 1888 a company — the Nippon Tetsudo Kaisha (Japan Railway Company) — was projected, its organisation could not be completed until the Treasury guaranteed eight per cent on the paid-up capital for fifteen years. Progress was slow at first, so