Just at present, a crisis, full blown as a chrysanthemum, has developed in the Imperial Diet.  Both Houses accuse the Government of improper interference—­this Japanese for ’plenty stick and some bank-note’—­at the recent elections.  They then did what was equivalent to passing a vote of censure on the Ministry and refusing to vote government measures.  So far the wildest advocate of representative government could have desired nothing better.  Afterwards, things took a distinctly Oriental turn.  The Ministry refused to resign, and the Mikado prorogued the Diet for a week to think things over.  The Japanese papers are now at issue over the event.  Some say that representative government implies party government, and others swear at large.  The Overseas Club says for the most part—­’Skittles!’

It is a picturesque situation—­one that suggests romances and extravaganzas.  Thus, imagine a dreaming Court intrenched behind a triple line of moats where the lotus blooms in summer—­a Court whose outer fringe is aggressively European, but whose heart is Japan of long ago, where a dreaming King sits among some wives or other things, amused from time to time with magic-lantern shows and performing fleas—­a holy King whose sanctity is used to conjure with, and who twice a year gives garden-parties where every one must come in top-hat and frock coat.  Round this Court, wavering between the splendours of the sleeping and the variety shows of the Crystal Palace, place in furious but carefully-veiled antagonism the fragments of newly shattered castes, their natural Oriental eccentricities overlaid with borrowed Western notions.  Imagine now, a large and hungry bureaucracy, French in its fretful insistence on detail where detail is of no earthly moment, Oriental in its stress on etiquette and punctillo, recruited from a military caste accustomed for ages past to despise alike farmer and trader.  This caste, we will suppose, is more or less imperfectly controlled by a syndicate of three clans, which supply their own nominees to the Ministry.  These are adroit, versatile, and unscrupulous men, hampered by no western prejudice in favour of carrying any plan to completion.  Through and at the bidding of these men, the holy Monarch acts; and the acts are wonderful.  To criticise these acts exists a wild-cat Press, liable to suppression at any moment, as morbidly sensitive to outside criticism as the American, and almost as childishly untruthful, fungoid in the swiftness of its growth, and pitiable in its unseasoned rashness.  Backers of this press in its wilder moments, lawless, ignorant, sensitive and vain, are the student class, educated in the main at Government expense, and a thorn in the side of the State.  Judges without training handle laws without precedents, and new measures are passed and abandoned with almost inconceivable levity.  Out of the welter of classes and interests that are not those of the common folk is evolved the thing called Japanese policy that has the proportion and the perspective of a Japanese picture.