No one will dispute the importance of Mr. Bagehot’s, contribution to this subject.  But it may be doubted whether he has pointed out the full reason for the difficulty of breaking the “cake of custom” or manifested the real root of progress.  To attain progress in the full sense, not merely of an oligarchy or a caste, but of the whole people, there must not only be government by discussion, but the responsibilities of the government must be snared more or less fully by all the governed.

History, however, shows that this cannot take place until a conception of intrinsic manhood and womanhood has arisen, a conception which emphasizes their infinite and inherent worth.  This conception is not produced by government by discussion, while government by discussion is the necessary consequence of the wide acceptance of this conception.  It is therefore the real root of progress.

As I look over the history of the Orient, I find no tendency to discover the inherent worth of man or to introduce the principle of government by discussion.  Left to themselves, I see no probability that any of these nations would ever have been able to break the thrall of their customs, and to reach that stage of development in which common individuals could be trusted with a large measure of individual liberty.  Though I can conceive that Japan might have secured a thorough-going political centralization under the old regime, I cannot see that that centralization would have been accompanied by growing liberty for the individual or by such constitutional rights for the common man as he enjoys to-day.  Whatever progress she might have made in the direction of nationality it would still have been a despotism.  The common man would have remained a helpless and hopeless slave.  Art might have prospered; the people might have remained simple-minded and relatively contented.  But they could not have attained that freedom and richness of life, that personality, which we saw in our last chapter to be the criterion and goal of true progress.

If the reader judges the above contention correct and agrees with the writer that the conception of the inherent value of a human being could not arise spontaneously in Japan, he will conclude that the progress of Japan depended on securing this important conception from without.  Exactly this has taken place.  By her thorough-going abandonment of the feudal social order and adoption of the constitutional and representative government of Christendom, whether she recognizes it or not, she has accepted the principles of the inherent worth of manhood and womanhood, as well as government by discussion.  Japan has thus, by imitation rather than by origination, entered on the path of endless progress.

So important, however, is the step recently taken that further analysis of this method of progress is desirable for its full comprehension.  We have already noted quite briefly[F] how Japan was supplied by the West with the ideal of national unity and the material instruments essential to its attainment.  In connection with the high development of the nation as a whole, these two elements of progress, the ideal and the material, need further consideration.