Japanese civilisation, he reiterated, was “only good in the sense that Greek and Roman civilisations were good.”  Modern Japan represented “the best of Europe minus Christianity; the moral backbone of Christianity is lacking.”  “Probe a dozen Buddhist priests in turn,” he said, “and you find something lacking; you don’t find the Buddhist or Confucian really to be your brother[106].”

“The greatness of England,” he went on, “is not due to the inherent greatness of the English people, but to the greatness of the truths which they have received.”  In considering the sources of national greatness, it was idle to believe that some peoples were original and some not original in their ideas and methods.  Where were the people to be found who were without extraneous influence?  Where would England be without Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christianity?

Our talk broke off as several peasant women passed us on the narrow way by the rice fields.  The mattocks they carried were the same weight as their husbands’ mattocks and the women were going to do the same work as the men.  But the women were nearly all handicapped by having a child tied on their backs.  Uchimura, returning to his objection to foreign political adventure, said that Japan, properly cultivated, could support twice its present population.  There were many marshy districts which could be brought into cultivation by drainage.  Then what might not forestry do?  But the progress could not be made because of lack of money.  The money was needed for “national defence.”

“For myself,” said Uchimura, “I find it still possible to believe in some power which will take care of inoffensive, quiet, humble, industrious people.  If all the high virtues of mankind are not safeguarded somehow, then let us take leave of all the ennobling aspirations, all the poetry, and all the deepest hopes we have, and cease to struggle upward.  The question is whether we have faith.”  We still waited, he declared, for the nation which would be Christian enough to take its stand on the Gospel and sacrifice itself materially, if need be, to its faith that right was greater than might.

And so “impractical, outspoken to rashness, but thoroughly sincere and experienced,” as one of his appreciative countrymen characterised him to me, we take leave of the “Japanese Carlyle.”  With whom could I have gone more provocatively towards the foundation of things at the beginning of my investigation in farther Japan?

FOOTNOTES: 

[100] The statement is, he told me, a calumny.  He explained that he lost his post for refusing to bow, not to the portrait, but to the signature of the Emperor, the signature appended to that famous Imperial rescript on education which is appointed to be read in schools.  Uchimura is very willing, he said, to show the respect which loyal Japanese are at all times ready to manifest to the Emperor, and he would certainly bow before the portrait of His Majesty; but in the proposal that reverence should be paid to the Imperial autograph he thought he saw the demands of a “Kaiserism”—­his word, he speaks vigorous English—­which was foreign to the Japanese conception of their sovereign, which would be inimical to the Emperor’s influence and would be bad for the nation.