alone is impossible, for the environment seems to be essentially the same.  This difference of attitude and action must be traced, it would seem, to differences of mental and temperamental characteristics.  Those who seek to understand the secret of Japan’s newly won power and reputation by looking simply at her newly acquired forms of government, her reconstructed national social structure, her recently constructed roads and railroads, telegraphs, representative government, etc., and especially at her army and navy organized on European models and armed with European weapons, are not unlike those who would discover the secret of human life by the study of anatomy.

This external view and this method of interpretation are, therefore, fundamentally erroneous.  Never, perhaps, has the progress of a nation been so manifestly an evolution as distinguished from a revolution.  No foreign conquerors have come in with their armies, crushing down the old and building up a new civilization.  No magician’s wand has been waved over the land to make the people forget the traditions of a thousand years and fall in with those of the new regime.  No rite or incantation has been performed to charm the marvelous tree of civilization and cause it to take root and grow to such lofty proportions in an unprepared soil.

In contrast to the defective views outlined above, one need not hesitate to believe that the actual process by which Old Japan has been transformed into New Japan is perfectly natural and necessary.  It has been a continuous growth; it is not the mere accumulation of external additions; it does not consist alone of the acquisition of the machinery and the institutions of the Occident.  It is rather a development from within, based upon already existing ideas and institutions.  New Japan is the consequence of her old endowment and her new environment.  Her evolution has been in progress and can be traced for at least a millennium and a half, during which she has been preparing for this latest step.  All that was necessary for its accomplishment was the new environment.  The correctness of this view and the reasons for it will appear as we proceed in our study of Japanese characteristics.  But we need to note at this point the danger, into which many fall, of ascribing to Japan an attainment of western civilization which the facts will not warrant.  She has secured much, but by no means all, that the West has to give.

We may suggest our line of thought by asking what is the fundamental element of civilization?  Does it consist in the manifold appliances that render life luxurious; the railroad, the telegraph, the post office, the manufactures, the infinite variety of mechanical and other conveniences?  Or is it not rather the social and intellectual and ethical state of a people?  Manifestly the latter.  The tools indeed of civilization may be imported into a half-civilized, or barbarous country; such importation, however, does not render