evolution has yet given a complete statement of the factors of the physiological evolution of man.  It is certain, however, that ethical, religious, and social writers who have striven to account for the higher evolution of man, by appealing to factors exclusively parallel to those which have produced the physiological evolution of man, have conspicuously failed.  However much we may find to praise in the social interpretations of such eminent writers as Comte, Spencer, Ward, Fiske, Giddings, Kidd, Southerland, or even Drummond, there still remains the necessity of a fuller consideration of the moral and religious evolution of man.  The higher evolution of man cannot be adequately expressed or even understood in any terms lower than those of personality.

EVOLUTION OF THE JAPANESE

I

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

Said a well educated and widely read Englishman to the writer while in Oxford, “Can you explain to me how it is that the Japanese have succeeded in jumping out of their skins?” And an equally thoughtful American, speaking about the recent strides in civilization made by Japan, urged that this progress could not be real and genuine.  “How can such a mushroom-growth, necessarily without deep roots in the past, be real and strong and permanent?  How can it escape being chiefly superficial?” These two men are typical of much of the thought of the West in regard to Japan.

Seldom, perhaps never, has the civilized world so suddenly and completely reversed an estimate of a nation as it has that with reference to Japan.  Before the recent war, to the majority even of fairly educated men, Japan was little more than a name for a few small islands somewhere near China, whose people were peculiar and interesting.  To-day there is probably not a man, or woman, or child attending school in any part of the civilized world, who does not know the main facts about the recent war:  how the small country and the men of small stature, sarcastically described by their foes as “Wojen,” pygmy, attacked the army and navy of a country ten times their size.

Such a universal change of opinion regarding a nation, especially regarding one so remote from the centers of Western civilization as Japan, could not have taken place in any previous generation.  The telegraph, the daily paper, the intelligent reporters and writers of books and magazine articles, the rapid steam travel and the many travelers—­all these have made possible this sudden acquisition of knowledge and startling reversal of opinion.