We note in the first place that both begin with imitation, but if progress is to be real and lasting, both must grow to independence.

The first and by far the most important is the psychical, the introduction of new ideas.  So long as the old, familiar ideas hold sway over the mind of a nation, there is little or no stimulus to comparison and discussion.  Stagnation is well-nigh complete.  But let new ideas be so introduced as to compel attention and comprehension, and the mind spontaneously awakes to wonderful activity.  The old stagnation is no longer possible.  Discussion is started; and in the end something must take place, even if the new ideas are not accepted wholly or even in part.  But they will not gain attention if presented simply in the abstract, unconnected with real life.  They must bring evidence that, if accepted and lived, they will be of practical use, that they will give added power to the nation.

Exactly this took place in 1854 when Admiral Perry demanded entrance to Japan.  The people suddenly awoke from their sleep of two and a half centuries to find that new nations had arisen since they closed their eyes, nations among which new sets of ideas had been at work, giving them a power wholly unknown to the Orient and even mysterious to it.  Those ideas were concerned, not alone with the making of guns, the building of ships, the invention of machinery, the taming and using of the forces of nature, but also with methods of government and law, with strange notions, too, about religion and duty, about the family and the individual, which the foreigners said were of inestimable value and importance.  It needed but a few years of intercourse with Western peoples to convince the most conservative that unless the Japanese themselves could gain the secret of their power, either by adopting their weapons or their civilization, they themselves must fade away before the stronger nations.  The need of self-preservation was the first great stimulus that drove new thoughts into unwilling brains.

There can be no doubt that the Japanese were right in this analysis of the situation.  Had they insisted on maintaining their old methods of national life and social order and ancient customs, there can be no doubt as to the result.  Africa and India in recent decades and China and Korea in the most recent years tell the story all too clearly.  Those who know the course of treaty conferences and armed collisions, as at Shimonoseki and Kagoshima between Japan and the foreign nations, have no doubt that Japan, divided into clans and persisting in her love of feudalism, would long since have become the territory of some European Power.  She was saved by the possession of a remarkable combination of national characteristics,—­the powers of observation, of appreciation, and of imitation.  In a word, her sensitiveness to her environment and her readiness to respond to it proved to be her salvation.