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Rh in money-making, to lead decent, self-respecting lives, to discard foolish old customs, to diffuse well-being throughout the nation by levelling ranks,—he himself giving the example, for he dropped his Samurai privileges, and became a mere commoner, and, as already noticed, uniformly rejected all official preferments and emoluments. He it was who first introduced into Japan the practice of lecturing and public speaking, for which several of his most progressive contemporaries had declared the Japanese language unfit. He it was who led the way in fitting the language better still to* bear its new responsibilities by coining equivalents for English technical terms. Besides composing, compiling, translating, paraphrasing, and abridging a whole library of books and editing a popular newspaper, Fukuzawa occupied himself with the foundation and supervision of a school, which became famous throughout the land under the name of Keiō Gijiku,—a school in both senses of the word, as an educational institution and as a centre of intellectual and social influence. On this school his mind impressed itself so powerfully during a period of over thirty years, his revolutionary views and methods so closely suited the needs of a rising generation which had broken with its entire past, the numbers who flocked to learn of him were consequently so great and so easily moulded, that it is no exaggeration to call Fukuzawa the intellectual father of more than half the men who now direct the affairs of the country. Therein lies the importance of his life-work; for though locally landed as a thinker, Fukuzawa was far more of a worker. Like the French encyclopaedists, he laboured for universal enlightenment and for social reform. His "philosophy" was not original, and amounted at best to little more than an amiable optimism of a utilitarian cast. But such as it was, the leading minds among his countrymen have adopted it.

Fukuzawa's success as an author was phenomenal. His separate works, as usually enumerated, amount to 50, making 105 volumes, of which, between 1860 and 1893, no less than 3,500,000 copies, or 7,490,000 volumes, had been issued from the press.