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Rh ex-Premier (Count Okuma) and his Minister of Education. The former, who is not chary of autobiography, in a speech which created some sensation confessed that as a young man he had been too dazzled by the splendour of Western civilisation to appreciate the seamy side of material progress, but recent experience of popular movements and public affairs had convinced him that the supreme need of all classes, if their prosperity were to continue, was a return to the higher morality of the past. Mr. Hayashi, who may be thought to have interpreted his duty of directing national education too literally, put the matter in a nutshell. "Let us suppose," said he to a popular audience, "that Japan in the course of a thousand years or so were to become a republic. If the same Mammon-worship should exist then as exists now, it is certain that the Vanderbilt or Jay Gould of the day would be elected President." Few nations care to be lectured in this way, even by Ministers of Education. The result was a violent agitation, fomented in the patriotic Press, which demanded the resignation of one who could be so disloyal to his sovereign as to hint at a possible republic ten centuries ahead. The rash moralist found it expedient to resign. Assuming, however, as one is perhaps entitled to assume, that the speaker had chiefly in mind the venality of politicians, I doubt very much either the extent or the heinousness of the evil denounced. Reduced to detail, the charges amount to this: that electors and deputies have been known to sell their votes and to advocate measures from which they have made preparations to derive financial benefit. Such evils are inseparable from the infancy of representative government, and persist in veiled form in its maturity. The Unionist member of