Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/387

 friendly a people, so eager to learn and so quick to acquire. It is true that foreign merchants and officials in China laud the superior qualities of the Celestial, and infer a superficiality and want of seriousness in the Japanese; but the alien who has dwelt in Japan experiences a new homesickness when he exchanges a Japanese port for one across the Yellow Sea, with “Nanking” instead of “Nippon” servitors about him. The Japanese make an unconscious appeal to a sentiment deeper than mere admiration, but the secret of the fascination they exercise defies analysis.

Politically and socially, the Japanese copy the examples of the western world; and the Restoration, with its consequences, furnishes the most astonishing political problem of the century. The sudden abandonment of the old order, the upspringing of a whole nation armed  in modern panoply of peace, has been too amazing to be at once accepted, at least among Europeans, as a real and permanent condition of things. If Europe cannot take the United States seriously after a whole century of steadfastness, much less can it comprehend an alien nation like Japan in a brief score of years.

A constitution and a parliament have been voluntarily given to a people who had hardly chafed under autocratic forms, or even demanded a representation. Its military and naval establishments, its police organization, and its civil service are modelled upon the best of many foreign models. Its educational system is complete, an admirable union of the best of American, English, and German methods. Its postal establishment, its light-houses, telegraphs, railways, hospitals equal those of the West. And all this was accomplished, not by slow growth and gradual development, the fruit of long need, but almost overnight, voluntarily, and at a wave of the imperial magician's wand.

This new birth, this sudden change from feudalism 371