. Nine years in Nipon. Sketches of Japanese life and manners. the mysteriesof statecraft in this humble and informal way. By-and-by arose a disposition cautiously to questionpublicly the wisdom and finality of the act itself Thewide world outside was always sending in through somenewly-discovered chink a ray of knowledge that was feltto be only good for man. Nor were there wanting now and again adventurerswho would risk even life itself for one sweet bite of theforbidden fruit. The light at last dawned, and when the 296 Nine Years in Nipon. ?Black Ships first came, the people were really far b
. Nine years in Nipon. Sketches of Japanese life and manners. the mysteriesof statecraft in this humble and informal way. By-and-by arose a disposition cautiously to questionpublicly the wisdom and finality of the act itself Thewide world outside was always sending in through somenewly-discovered chink a ray of knowledge that was feltto be only good for man. Nor were there wanting now and again adventurerswho would risk even life itself for one sweet bite of theforbidden fruit. The light at last dawned, and when the 296 Nine Years in Nipon. ?Black Ships first came, the people were really far betterprepared to welcome them than we have been wont tosuppose. The Shoguns party then began to move, and,of course, the Mikados party then asserted itself as essen-tially conservative. The conservative cause, too, includedthe rowdy military element, in which the masterless two-sworded men or ronins played a bloody and conspicuouspart. They were ready at least to lay their lives downvoluntarily rather than see Japan stained by the footstepsof Whig and Tory.(From a Japanese ^Dialogue on Political Economy.) New blood was infused into the old veins of the politi-cal organism. Men of the people, as we have seen, madethemselves felt, and the progressionists who sided withthe Shogun were outbid in Radicalism by those who General Survey. 297 ran the boy Mikado into power once more—power thatwas now to be formally supreme, and almost as muchthat of the people themselves—although this is hardlyvisible yet, as is the authority of the United StatesPresident. The preparedness of the people is apparentfrom the suddenness of the change. Such a transforma-tion may seem easy and natural to those who derivetheir notions of Oriental history from the translationsof the Arabian Nights; but in Japan, as, I believe, every-where else, such free movements are effected by measurabledynamic influences which the patient historian may hopeyet to analyze and record. But what of the large a
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