Finality and stability are absent from its councils.  To-day, for reasons none can explain, it is pro-foreign to the verge of servility.  To-morrow, for reasons equally obscure, the pendulum swings back, and—­the students are heaving mud at the foreigners in the streets.  Vexatious, irresponsible, incoherent, and, above all, cheaply mysterious, is the rule of the land—­stultified by intrigue and counter-intrigue, chequered with futile reforms begun on European lines and light-heartedly thrown aside; studded, as a bower-bird’s run is studded with shells and shining pebbles, with plagiarisms from half the world—­an operetta of administration, wherein the shadow of the King among his wives, Samurai policemen, doctors who have studied under Pasteur, kid-gloved cavalry officers from St. Cyr, judges with University degrees, harlots with fiddles, newspaper correspondents, masters of the ancient ceremonies of the land, paid members of the Diet, secret societies that borrow the knife and the dynamite of the Irish, sons of dispossessed Daimios returned from Europe and waiting for what may turn up, with ministers of the syndicate who have wrenched Japan from her repose of twenty years ago, circle, flicker, shift, and reform, in bewildering rings, round the foreign resident.  Is the extravaganza complete?

Somewhere in the background of the stage are the people of the land—­of whom a very limited proportion enjoy the privileges of representative government.  Whether in the past few years they have learned what the thing means, or, learning, have the least intention of making any use of it, is not clear.  Meantime, the game of government goes forward as merrily as a game of puss-in-the-corner, with the additional joy that not more than half-a-dozen men know who is controlling it or what in the wide world it intends to do.  In Tokio live the steadily-diminishing staff of Europeans employed by the Emperor as engineers, railway experts, professors in the colleges and so forth.  Before many years they will all be dispensed with, and the country will set forth among the nations alone and on its own responsibility.

In fifty years then, from the time that the intrusive American first broke her peace, Japan will experience her new birth and, reorganised from sandal to top-knot, play the samisen in the march of modern progress.  This is the great advantage of being born into the New Era, when individual and community alike can get something for nothing—­pay without work, education without effort, religion’ without thought, and free government without slow and bitter toil.