Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/188

158 forgetting class prejudice. Perhaps the hardest of all truths engrained in Oriental theory and conduct is the unimportance of time. We, who live by machinery which measures for most men the hours of work, the hours of play, until life becomes a time-table and the heart a chronometer, are absolutely incapable of indifference to Time's tyranny. When I proffered or accepted an invitation, nothing amused these hospitable lotus-eaters so much as my natural bias towards punctuality. What did it matter? The morning, if I liked, or the afternoon, or the evening: time was made for man, not man for time. Accordingly, if I paid a promised call and became the involuntary witness of a toilette, a meal, or a siesta, I had merely to withdraw and call again. If my guests did not arrive at the prescribed hour, they would come some hours later, or even sooner, or not at all. At first I was so put out by these vagaries and so fearful of intruding, that it took message after message to draw me from my own society or that of a book. But gradually I realised that in this happy country offence was not readily given or taken; that time was a negligible convention; that to follow the impulse of the moment was wiser than to ape the precision of a clock. I have heard the British trader exclaim in Japan, "They can never become a great nation; they are so unbusinesslike!" and I sympathised with his horror of Eastern nonchalance, but I doubt his conclusion. Merchants in Russia are just as dilatory. Yet either country can count on promptitude in military or political exigency. What commerce loses in time it gains to some extent through restrictions imposed on foreign rivalry. In any case, as they emerge from feudal to industrial conditions those indolent races will be forced by the law