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410 alleged, and alleged truly, that the Japanese sometimes contribute large sums and make considerable sacrifices for pious ends. For example, no less than 1,200,000 yen were subscribed in six provinces alone for the benefit of the Nishi Hongwanji temple at Kyōto during the year 1900. On other occasions, not only has money been forthcoming in abundance for the rearing of temples of the favourite Monto sect, but men have given their own manual labour to the task, as something more personal than mere silver and gold. They have even cut off their queues, and the women have cut off their tresses, wherewith to make hawsers to lift into place the timbers of the sacred edifice. We imagine, however, that such zealots belonged almost exclusively to the peasant and artisan classes. The subject is a difficult one. These (perhaps inconsistent) remarks are thrown out merely by way of suggestion, in order to restrain Europeans from judging too summarily of conditions alien to the whole trend of their own experience.

It has often been alleged of late that patriotism and loyalty to the sacred, heaven-descended Mikado amount to a religion in Japan. If we are to accept this statement, one important qualification must be made, which is that the fervour of patriotism and loyalty to the throne, which we see to-day at a white heat, is no legacy from a hoary antiquity, but a quite recent development,—one of the many indirect results of the Europeanisation of Japanese institutions, as already hinted on page 8. It is no ingrained racial characteristic; it is a phase, comparable in some ways to the Puritan fervour which blazed up in England two or three centuries ago, and for a season moulded everything to its own temper. Like the stern enthusiasm of Cromwell's Ironsides, like the fiery zeal of the French revolutionary hosts, like all partly moral, partly political enthusiasms, it arms its votaries, and in fact the whole nation, with well-nigh irresistible might for the time being. It is a highly interesting phenomenon,—admirable in the fearless self-abnegation which it inspires, grotesque in the