In the End
influences, successively, have been uppermost at court, and their languages and customs successively fashionable. The Germans, to our shame be it said, have dealt with them more honorably than any other people, and the present triumph of German interests has been well deserved.
The ambition, the courage, and persistency of this small nation, in the face of such hindrances, is wonderful; and their struggles with strange tongues, strange customs, and strange dress, all at once, were heroic. Indifferent critics ascribe this peaceful revolution to a love of novelty and an idle craze for foreign fashions. They claim that it is but a phase, a fleeting fancy, a bit of masquerading, to be abandoned when the people weary of it, or attain their ends. But fickleness is not the characteristic of thousands of persons of one race, pursuing the same objects for thirty years; nor could a nation of such taste and intelligence adopt and adhere to strange customs for the mere sake of novelty. Prophecies of retrogression discredit themselves, now that a whole generation has grown up to whom the new is the established order. Japanese youths, educated and trained abroad, have returned home to fill the places of foreign instructors and managers. Each year fewer and fewer foreigners are needed in Government departments and institutions. “Japan for the Japanese” is a familiar cry. The desire for enlightenment and the impulse towards progress were the result of forces already acting from within, long before Commodore Perry’s black ships came to anchor in Mississippi Bay, and still potent as then.
In this day the way to distinction and power is open to the humblest. There is a baton in every knapsack, an imperial councillor’s star in every school-room. The merchant has been ennobled, the samurai have sat at the Emperor’s table, the eta walks free, the equal of other citizens, and the humblest peasant has inviolable civil rights.
373
