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184 the impression left was that they had been their own school masters. In another letter on "Japan in Arms," he discoursed concerning "the Japanese military re-organisers," the Yokosuka dockyard, and other matters, but omitted to mention that the re-organisers were Frenchmen, and that the Yokosuka dockyard also was a French creation. Similarly, when treating of the development of the Japanese newspaper press, he ignored the fact that it owed its origin to an Englishman, which surely, to one whose object was reality, should have seemed an item worth recording.

These letters, so full and apparently so frank, really so deceptive, are, as we have said, but one instance among many of the way in which popular writers on Japan travesty history by ignoring the part which foreigners have played. The reasons of this are not far to seek. A wonderful tale will please folks at a distance all the better if made more wonderful still. Japanese progress traced to its causes and explained by reference to the means employed, is not nearly such fascinating reading as when represented in the guise of a fairy creation sprung from nothing, like Aladdin's palace. Many good people enjoy nothing so much as unlimited sugar and superlatives; and the Japanese have really done so much that it seems scarcely stretching the truth to make out that they have done the impossible. Then, too, they are such pleasant hosts, whereas the foreign employés are not always inclined to be hosts at all to the literary and journalistic globe trotter, who thirsts for facts and statistics, subject always to the condition that he shall be free to bend the statistics and facts to his own theories, and demonstrate to old residents that their opinions are simply a mass of prejudice. There is nothing picturesque in the foreign employe. With his club, and his tennis-ground, and his brick house, and his wife's piano, and the rest of the European entourage which he strives to create around him in order sometimes to forget his exile, he strikes a false note. The esthetic and literary globe-trotter would fain revel in a tea-tray existence for the nonce, because the very