Not otherwise is it in the life of nations.  There are times when their growth is phenomenally rapid; when their latent qualities are developed; when their growth can be watched with special ease and delight, because so rapid.  The Renaissance was such a period in Europe.  Modern art, science, and philosophy took their start with the awakening of the mind of Europe at that eventful and epochal period of her life.  Such, I take it, is the condition of Japan to-day.  She is “being born again”; undergoing her “renaissance.”  Her intellect, hitherto largely dormant, is but now awaking.  Her ambition is equaled only by her self-reliance.  Her self-confidence and amazing expectations have not yet been sobered by hard experience.  Neither does she, nor do her critics, know how much she can or cannot do.  She is in the first flush of her new-found powers; powers of mind and spirit, as well as of physical force.  Her dreams are gorgeous with all the colors of the rainbow.  Her efforts are sure, to be noble in proportion as her ambitions are high.  The growth of the past half-century is only the beginning of what we may expect to see.

Then again, this latest and greatest step in the evolution of Japan has taken place at a time unparalleled for opportunities of observation, under the incandescent light of the nineteenth century, with its thousands of educated men to observe and record the facts, many of whom are active agents in the evolution in progress.  Hundreds of papers and magazines, native and European, read by tens of thousands of intelligent men and women, have kept the world aware of the daily and hourly events.  Telegraphic dispatches and letters by the million have passed between the far East and the West.  It would seem as if the modernizing of Japan had been providentially delayed until the last half of the nineteenth century with its steam and electricity, annihilators of space and time, in order that her evolution might be studied with a minuteness impossible in any previous age, or by any previous generation.  It is almost as if one were conducting an experiment in human evolution in his own laboratory, imposing the conditions and noting the results.

For still another reason is the evolution of New Japan of special interest to all intelligent persons.  To illustrate great things by small, and human by physical, no one who has visited Geneva has failed to see the beautiful mingling of the Arve and the Rhone.  The latter flowing from the calm Geneva lake is of delicate blue, pure and limpid.  The former, running direct from the glaciers of Mont Blanc and the roaring bed of Chamouni, bears along in its rushing waters powdered rocks and loosened soil.  These rivers, though joined in one bed, for hundreds of rods are quite distinct; the one, turbid; the other, clear as crystal; yet they press each against the other, now a little of the Rhone’s clear current forces its way into the Arve, soon to be carried off, absorbed and discolored by the mass of muddy water around it.  Now a little of the turbid Arve forces its way into the clear blue Rhone, to lose there its identity in the surrounding waters.  The interchange goes on, increasing with the distance until, miles below, the two-rivers mingle as one.  No longer is it the Arve or the old Rhone, but the new Rhone.