Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/30

12 No wonder that Mr. B. H. Chamberlain asked, "Could any one imagine such terms having ever been agreed to except as the result of a disastrous war?"

Happily, between the discontented British and the ultra-patriotic Japanese lies a barrier of prudent statesmanship, which has proved itself equal to solving harder problems than any with which the Western world is confronted. No other Eastern nation has known how to transform its polity in accordance with Occidental ideas without provoking internal disruption or external conquest. It is not yet realised that the credit of the achievement is due to a very small band of men—to the Marquess Ito and his associates on the one hand and the foreign instructors on the other, whose names are too soon forgotten, while their works live after them. Though all their compatriots now reap in advancing prestige and prosperity the benefits of the work performed by the "Clan Statesmen," it must not be forgotten that much of that work was accomplished in the face of every obstacle which prejudice and short-sightedness could interpose. Popular dissatisfaction was adroitly diverted by declaring war on China at the moment when factious opposition was bringing discredit on the four-years-old parliamentary Government, and Ministers were strong enough to hold an indignant nation in hand when the fruits of war were so unscrupulously torn from their grasp by Muscovite intrigue. Indications are not wanting that the spirit of tactful sense which has steered Japan through so many tempests is competent to allay those prognosticated by the Cassandras of Kōbe and Yokohama. Those journalistic beldames, who predicted sickness and death for the European inmate of a Japanese prison unless