Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/19

Rh recording the many and extraordinary virtues of the deceased,—his virtues, but also his frailties. For, more careful of fact than the generality of epitaphists, we have ventured to speak out our whole mind on almost every subject, and to call things by their right names, being persuaded that true appreciation is always critical as well as kindly.

Yes, we repeat it, Old Japan is dead and gone, and Young Japan reigns in its stead, as opposed in appearance and in aims to its predecessor as history shows many a youthful prince to have been to the late king, his father. The steam-whistle, the newspaper, the voting-paper, the pillar-post at every street-corner and even in remote villages, the clerk in shop or bank or public office hastily summoned from our side to answer the ring of the telephone bell, the railway replacing the palanquin, the iron-clad replacing the war-junk,—these and a thousand other startling changes testify that Japan is transported ten thousand miles away from her former moorings. She is transported out of her patriarchal calm into the tumult of Western competition,—a competition active right along the line, in diplomacy and war, in industries, in shipping, possibly even in colonisation. Nevertheless, as Madcap Hal, when once seated on the throne, showed plainly, despite all individual difference, that the blood of prudent Henry IV. ran in his veins, so is it abundantly clear to those who have dived beneath the surface of the modern Japanese upheaval that more of the past has been retained than has been let go. It is not merely that the revolution itself was an extremely