so deceptive, are, as we have said, but one instance among many of the way in which popular writers on Japan travesty history by ignoring the part which foreigners have played.  The reasons for this are not far to seek.  A wonderful tale will please folks at a distance all the better if made more wonderful still.  Japanese progress, traced to its causes and explained by references to the means employed, is not nearly such fascinating reading as when represented in the guise of a fairy creation, sprung from nothing, like Aladdin’s palace.”—­“Things Japanese,” p. 116.

But inter-racial misunderstanding is not, after all, so very strange.  Few things are more difficult than to accommodate one’s self in speech, in methods of life, and even in thought, to an alien people; so identifying one’s deepest interest with theirs as really to understand them.  The minds of most men are so possessed by notions acquired in childhood and youth as to be unable to see even the plainest facts at variance with those notions.  He who comes to Japan possessed with the idea that it is a dreamland and that its old social order was free from defects, is blind to any important facts invalidating that conception; while he who is persuaded that Japan, being Oriental, is necessarily pagan at heart, however civilized in form, cannot easily be persuaded that there is anything praiseworthy in her old civilization, in her moral or religious life, or in any of her customs.

If France fails in important respects to understand England; and England, Germany; and Germany, its neighbors; if even England and America can so misunderstand one another as to be on the verge of war over the boundary dispute of an alien country, what hope is there that the Occident shall understand the Orient, or the Orient the Occident?

Though the difficulty seems insurmountable, I am persuaded that the most fruitful cause of racial misunderstandings and of defective descriptions both of the West by Orientals, and of the East by Occidentals, is a well-nigh universal misconception as to the nature of man, and of society, and consequently of the laws determining their development.  In the East this error arises from and rests upon its polytheism, and the accompanying theories of special national creation and peculiar national sanctity.  On these grounds alien races are pronounced necessarily inferior.  China’s scorn for foreigners is due to these ideas.

Although this pagan notion has been theoretically abandoned in the West, it still dominates the thought not only of the multitudes, but also of many who pride themselves on their high education and liberal sentiments.  They bring to the support of their national or racial pride such modern sociological theories as lend themselves to this view.  Evolution and the survival of the fittest, degeneration and the arrest of development, are appealed to as justifying the arrogance and domineering spirit of Western nations.