Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/92

 attitude of ineffable superiority, the foreigner roundly accuses the Japanese people of conceit, and living carefully apart from them, charges them with exclusiveness and unsociability. It is not conceivable that any community of aliens living in an Occidental country under similar circumstances would find the people equally tolerant and good-humoured.

There is, of course, another side to the account. There is the open-handed benevolence with which the foreign resident responds to every appeal for aid when calamity overtakes the Japanese; there is the noble devotion of the missionaries, Roman Catholic and Protestant, who labour perpetually for the welfare of their Japanese brothers and sisters, and there is the generous appreciation of onlookers from a distance who see Japan's progress in its true proportions. Such object-lessons do much to mitigate the harsher mood habitually displayed by the foreigner within the gates. But the balance is largely on the side of disdainful superiority, benevolent condescension, or unkind criticism, and the Japanese, gradually learning to see these things as they really are, have come to understand that many of the qualities which they are denounced for not displaying find no place in the conduct of their denouncers. Additional light has been reflected on the subject by the anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe, and by the legislation of Australia and America for excluding