as it were, upon a new earth and a new heaven.  Those of forty years ago would be amazed, not only at the enormous changes in the externals, life and government, but also at the transformation which has overtaken every element of the older civilization.  Putting it rather strongly, it is now not the son who obeys the father, but the father the son.  The rulers no longer command the people, but the people command the rulers.  The people do not now toil to support the state; but the state toils to protect the people.

Whether the incoming of these new ideas and practices be thought to constitute progress or not will depend on one’s view of the aim of life.  If this be as maintained in the previous chapter, then surely the transformation of Japan must be counted progress.  That, however, to which I call attention is the fact that the essential requisite of progress is the attainment of new ideas, whatever be their source.  Japan has not only taken up a great host of these, but in doing so she has adopted a social structure to stimulate the continuous production of new ideas, through the development of individuality.  She is thus in the true line of continuously progressive evolution.  Imitating the stronger nations, she has introduced into her system the life-giving blood of free discussion, popular education, and universal individual rights and liberty.  In a word, she has begun to be an individualistic nation.  She has introduced a social order fitted to a wide development of personality.

The importance of the second line of progress, the physical, would seem to be too obvious to call for any detailed consideration.  But so much has been said by both graceful and able writers on Japan as to the advantages she enjoys from her simple non-mechanical civilization, and the mistake she is making in adopting the mechanical civilization of the West, that it may not be amiss to dwell for a few moments upon it.  I wish to show that the second element of progress consists in the increasing use of mechanisms.

The enthusiastic admirer of Japan hardly finds words wherewith sufficiently to praise the simplicity of her pre-Meiji civilization.  No furniture brings confusion to the room; no machinery distresses the ear with its groanings or the eye with its unsightliness.  No factories blacken the sky with smoke.  No trains screeching through the towns and cities disturb sleepers and frighten babies.  The simple bed on the floor, the straw sandal on the foot, wooden chopsticks in place of knives and forks, the small variety of foods and of cooking utensils, the simple, homespun cotton clothing, the fascinating homes, so small and neat and clean—­in truth all that pertains to Old Japan finds favor in the eyes of the enthusiastic admirer from the Occident.  One such writer, in an elaborate paper intended to set forth the superiority of the original Japanese to the Occidental civilization, uses the following language:  “Ability to