the same. And though the patriot might think, he would never say to your face, "L'étranger, voilà l'ennemi." On the contrary, if he had not the racial interest to consider, if he were not born in a maze of reciprocal duties which to us are inconceivable, so charming is his natural disposition that I am not a all sure that he would not, now and then, sacrifice himself to oblige an alien!
I have used the phrase "charming natural disposition" deliberately, though it may seem incongruous, or even incompatible with dislike of strangers. What traveller has not felt and described this charm? Will Adams in the beginning of the seventeenth century found "the people of this Iland good of nature, curteous aboue measure," and Sir Rutherford Alcock in the middle of the nineteenth reports them "as kindly and well-disposed people as any in the world." Has their nature, then, suffered any deterioration? Has contact with Europeans and Americans brought material gain at the cost of ethical loss? Many observers, both native and foreign, declare this to be the case: a little reflection will show that it cannot, for the present, be otherwise.
"Old Japan," in the opinion of Mr. Lafcadio Hearn, "was quite as much in advance of the nineteenth century morally as she was behind materially. She had made morality instinctive." This verdict is not yet of purely historic interest; it may be tested by all who care to travel beyond the radius of photographs and railways. In remote districts, where the innkeeper charges a minimum price, relying for profit on the generosity of his guest, whose present is acknowledged by the bestowal of a fan or an embroidered towel, even such fugitive relations rest on a benevolent rather than
