Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/251

RV 223 If the people have not yet made any significant contribution to the sum of Occidental scientific knowledge or mechanical contrivances, they are dismissed as imitative not initiative, which is much as though a lad should be charged with want of originality because, having barely mastered the integral calculus, he did not write some new chapters on quaternions. If they have not yet reduced constitutional government to a smoothly working system, have not yet emerged from a confusion of political coteries into the orderly condition of two great parties, each capable of assuming and discharging administrative responsibilities, they are declared unfit for representative institutions, though they have tried them for only ten years after fifteen centuries of military feudalism or hereditary oligarchy. If they do not carry on their new industries with the minimum of efficient labour, and if they fail to appreciate the economical necessity of bestowing constant care upon machinery and seeking to rise above first results instead of regarding them as the ne plus ultra of subsequent achievement, they are pronounced radically deficient in the industrial instinct, whereas the truth is that they have not as yet any accurate perception of the standards experience and competition have established in foreign countries.

The condition of their army and of their navy shows that not capacity but practice is what the Japanese lack. These two services are altogether