Mr. Ransome says that “there are three distinct Japans in existence side by side to-day,—­the old, which has not wholly died out; the new, hardly yet born except in spirit; and the transition, passing now through its most critical throes.”  While this is very true in most respects, and particularly as regards tangible and concrete institutions, the statement, as applied to fundamental ethical notions, requires some modification; for Bushido, the maker and product of Old Japan, is still the guiding principle of the transition and will prove the formative force of the new era.

The great statesmen who steered the ship of our state through the hurricane of the Restoration and the whirlpool of national rejuvenation, were men who knew no other moral teaching than the Precepts of Knighthood.  Some writers[30] have lately tried to prove that the Christian missionaries contributed an appreciable quota to the making of New Japan.  I would fain render honor to whom honor is due:  but this honor can hardly be accorded to the good missionaries.  More fitting it will be to their profession to stick to the scriptural injunction of preferring one another in honor, than to advance a claim in which they have no proofs to back them.  For myself, I believe that Christian missionaries are doing great things for Japan—­in the domain of education, and especially of moral education:—­only, the mysterious though not the less certain working of the Spirit is still hidden in divine secrecy.  Whatever they do is still of indirect effect.  No, as yet Christian missions have effected but little visible in moulding the character of New Japan.  No, it was Bushido, pure and simple, that urged us on for weal or woe.  Open the biographies of the makers of Modern Japan—­of Sakuma, of Saigo, of Okubo, of Kido, not to mention the reminiscences of living men such as Ito, Okuma, Itagaki, etc.:—­and you will find that it was under the impetus of samuraihood that they thought and wrought.  When Mr. Henry Norman declared, after his study and observation of the Far East,[31] that only the respect in which Japan differed from other oriental despotisms lay in “the ruling influence among her people of the strictest, loftiest, and the most punctilious codes of honor that man has ever devised,” he touched the main spring which has made new Japan what she is and which will make her what she is destined to be.

[Footnote 30:  Speer; Missions and Politics in Asia, Lecture IV, pp. 189-190; Dennis:  Christian Missions and Social Progress, Vol.  I, p. 32, Vol.  II, p. 70, etc.]

[Footnote 31:  The Far East, p. 375.]