Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/55

 of its incidents do as much credit to Japan's patience and tact as its finale does to the justice and liberality of Occidental Governments.

There is one page of the history that calls for special notice, since it supplies a key to much which would otherwise be inexplicable. The respect entertained by a nation for its own laws, and the confidence it reposes in their administrators are in direct proportion to the efforts it has expended upon the development of the former and the education of the latter. Foreigners residing in Japan naturally clung to consular jurisdiction as a privilege of inestimable value. They saw, indeed, that such a system could not be permanently imposed on a country where the conditions justifying it had nominally disappeared. But they saw, also, that the legal and judicial reforms effected by Japan had been crowded into an extraordinarily brief period, and that, as tyros experimenting with alien systems, the Japanese might be betrayed into many errors. A struggle thus ensued between foreign distrust on the one side and Japanese aspirations on the other, — a struggle often developing painful phases. For whereas the case for the foreign resident stood solid and rational so long as it rested on the basis of his proper attachment to the laws and the judiciary which the efforts of his nationals, through long generations, had rendered worthy of trust and reverence, and on the equally intelligible and reasonable ground that he wanted convincing