JAPAN
picion to certainty even without the testimony of Hollanders or British. A good deal has been urged in modern times by way of apology for the conduct of the English and the Dutch. Some have even denied the charge on behalf of one, or the other, or both. There is no occasion for either repudiation or extenuation. Considering the relations between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, between England and Spain, and between Holland and Portugal at that era, and recalling the canons of commercial combats and the rules of the religious lists at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it becomes evident that things fell out in Japan exactly as might have been predicated.
The facts here set down compel an impartial historian to admit that what Japan did in 1614, most European States would have done under the same circumstances at the same epoch. An impartial historian will probably go a great deal farther. He will conclude that the measures of expulsion and eradication adopted by Japan in 1614 would have been adopted forty or fifty years earlier by any European State under pressure of the same incentives. No European State would have tolerated for a moment the things that were perpetrated in the name of Christianity between 1560 and 1576 in Nagasaki and Bungo, and between 1597 and 1600 in Higo. No European State would have suffered the propagandists of a foreign faith to settle within its borders and excite a section of its
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