The Overseas Club, as has been said, is behind the spirit of the age.  It has to work for what it gets, and it does not always get what it works for.  Nor can its members take ship and go home when they please.  Imagine for a little, the contented frame of mind that is bred in a man by the perpetual contemplation of a harbour full of steamers as a Piccadilly cab-rank of hansoms.  The weather is hot, we will suppose; something has gone wrong with his work that day, or his children are not looking so well as might be.  Pretty tiled bungalows, bowered in roses and wistaria, do not console him, and the voices of the politest people on earth jar sorely.  He knows every soul in the club, has thoroughly talked out every subject of interest, and would give half a year’s—­oh, five years’—­pay for one lung-filling breath of air that has life in it, one sniff of the haying grass, or half a mile of muddy London street where the muffin bell tinkles in the four o’clock fog.  Then the big liner moves out across the staring blue of the bay.  So-and-so and such-an-one, both friends, are going home in her, and some one else goes next week by the French mail.  He, and he alone, it seems to him, must stay on; and it is so maddeningly easy to go—­for every one save himself.  The boat’s smoke dies out along the horizon, and he is left alone with the warm wind and the white dust of the Bund.  Now Japan is a good place, a place that men swear by and live in for thirty years at a stretch.  There are China ports a week’s sail to the westward where life is really hard, and where the sight of the restless shipping hurts very much indeed.  Tourists and you who travel the world over, be very gentle to the men of the Overseas Clubs.  Remember that, unlike yourselves, they have not come here for the good of their health, and that the return ticket in your wallet may possibly colour your views of their land.  Perhaps it would not be altogether wise on the strength of much kindness from Japanese officials to recommend that these your countrymen be handed over lock, stock, and barrel to a people that are beginning to experiment with fresh-drafted half-grafted codes which do not include juries, to a system that does not contemplate a free Press, to a suspicious absolutism from which there is no appeal.  Truly, it might be interesting, but as surely it would begin in farce and end in tragedy, that would leave the politest people on earth in no case to play at civilised government for a long time to come.  In his concession, where he is an apologetic and much sat-upon importation, the foreign resident does no harm.  He does not always sue for money due to him on the part of a Japanese.  Once outside those limits, free to move into the heart of the country, it would only be a question of time as to where and when the trouble would begin.  And in the long run it would not be the foreign resident that would suffer.  The imaginative eye can see the most unpleasant possibilities, from a general overrunning of Japan by the Chinaman, who is far the most important foreign resident, to the shelling of Tokio by a joyous and bounding Democracy, anxious to vindicate her national honour and to learn how her newly-made navy works.