“In the case of such writers as Sir Edwin Arnold and Mr. Lafcadio Hearn it is quite apparent that the logical faculty is in abeyance.  Imagination reigns supreme.  As poetic nights or outbursts, the works of these authors on Japan are delightful reading.  But no one who has studied the Japanese in a deeper manner, by more intimate daily intercourse with all classes of the people than either of these writers pretends to have had, can possibly regard a large part of their description as anything more than pleasing fancy.  Both have given rein to the poetic fancy and thus have, from a purely literary point of view, scored a success granted to few....  But as exponents of Japanese life and thought they are unreliable....  They have given form and beauty to much that never existed except in vague outline or in undeveloped germs in the Japanese mind.  In doing this they have unavoidably been guilty of misrepresentation....  The Japanese nation of Arnold and Hearn is not the nation we have known for a quarter of a century, but a purely ideal one manufactured out of the author’s brains.  It is high time that this was pointed out.  For while such works please a certain section of the English public, they do a great deal of harm among a section of the Japanese public, as could be easily shown in detail, did space allow.”—­Japan Mail, May 7, 1898.

But even more harmful to the reading public of England and America are the hastily formed yet, nevertheless, widely published opinions of tourists and newspaper correspondents.  Could such writers realize the inevitable limitations under which they see and try to generalize, the world would be spared many crudities and exaggerations, not to say positive errors.  The impression so common to-day that Japan’s recent developments are anomalous, even contrary to the laws of national growth, is chiefly due to the superficial writings of hasty observers.  Few of those who have dilated ecstatically on her recent growth have understood either the history or the genius of her people.

“To mention but one among many examples,” says Prof.  Chamberlain, “the ingenious Traveling Commissioner of the Pall Mall Gazette, Mr. Henry Norman, in his lively letters on Japan published nine or ten years ago, tells the story of Japanese education under the fetching title of ‘A Nation at School’; but the impression left is that they have been their own schoolmasters.  In another letter on ‘Japan in Arms,’ he discourses concerning ’The Japanese Military Re-organizers,’ ‘The Yokosuka dockyard,’ and other matters, but omits to mention that the reorganizers were Frenchmen, and that the Yokosuka dockyard was also a French creation.  Similarly, when treating of the development of the Japanese newspaper, he ignores the fact that it owed its origin to an Englishman, which surely, to a man whose object was reality, should have seemed an object worth recording.  These letters, so full and apparently so frank, really