Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/52



Though time and space had so muffled the protesting shrieks of Cassandra that I could no longer hear her whirling prophecies or follow her sorry fortunes from day to day in the chivalrous Press of the treaty-ports, I never lost interest or sympathy in her loudly predicted future. I would picture her borne with streaming eyes and hair from her extra-territorial temple; I would ask myself whether she had yet been borne off into bondage unspeakable by some Japanese Agamemnon. News travels slowly, and I was forced to content myself with the most meagre reports, when one day came a letter with the Yokohama postmark, in which the writer took exception to some statements made by me in a lecture to the Playgoers' Club on the subject of Japanese theatres, and improved the occasion by despatching much irrelevant information on the subject of Japanese iniquity. I owe a heavy debt of gratitude to Mr. F. Schroeder, the editor and proprietor of The Eastern World, for those letters and pamphlets. They assure me of the welcome fact that Cassandra is alive and free, and protesting more loudly than ever. I gladly give publicity to the incidents and speculations recorded in them, for, while they seem to justify honest apprehension on the part of Cassandra's friends, they also contain indications that Agamemnon is by no means so subject to Thersites as the foes of Far Eastern democracy would have us believe.

The question which raises most speculation, on account of the uncertainty of the law to be applied, is also the most important. It concerns leasehold. Hitherto foreigners had supposed themselves to hold land under a perpetual lease on payment of a lump sum to the vendor and of annual ground-rent to the Government. But, when a recent application was made to the local court in Yokohama for the registration of the transfer of property so held from one British subject to another, the Court replied that it had no power to register such a transfer, offering instead to describe the property as a perpetual superficies. The offer was refused and the point submitted to the British Minister. If it should be decided that the foreign owner is no more than a superficiary, the ground at a distance of more than thirty feet below the surface tacitly reverts to the Government, which of course would have the right to sell it for