are compelled to study a long and unfamiliar list of errors in English speech current only in the London streets, in order to identify and correct them on the Oxford papers, distributed with Olympian impartiality to all parts of the Empire.  Such insularity of mind seems to justify Bernard Shaw’s description of Britain as an island whose natives regard its manners and customs as laws of nature.  Yet these are the people who in the Nile Valley have become masters of irrigation, unsurpassed even by the ancient Egyptians; who, in the snow-wrapped forests of Hudson Bay, are trappers and hunters unequalled by the Indians; who, in the arid grasslands of Australia, pasture their herds like nomad shepherd or American cowboy, and in the Tropics loll like the natives, but somehow manage to do a white man’s stint of work.

[Sidenote:  The case of Japan.]

In Japan, isolation has excluded or reduced to controllable measure every foreign force that might break the continuity of the national development or invade the integrity of the national ideal.  Japan has always borrowed freely from neighboring Asiatic countries and recently from the whole world; yet everything in Japan bears the stamp of the indigenous.  The introduction of foreign culture into the Empire has been a process of selection and profound modification to accord with the national ideals and needs.[819] Buddhism, coming from the continent, was Japanized by being grafted on to the local stock of religious ideas, so that Japanese Buddhism is strongly differentiated from the continental forms of that religion.[820] The seventeenth century Catholicism of the Jesuits, before it was hospitably received, had to be adapted to Japanese standards of duty and ritual.  Modern Japanese converts to Christianity wish themselves to conduct the local missions and teach a national version of the new faith.[821] But all the while, Japanese religion has experienced no real change of heart.  The core of the national faith is the indigenous Shinto cult, which no later interloper has been permitted to dislodge or seriously to transform; and this has survived, wrapped in the national consciousness, wedded to the national patriotism, lifted above competition.  Here is insular conservatism.

Japan’s sudden and complete abandonment of a policy of seclusion which had been rigidly maintained for two hundred and fifty years, and her entrance upon a career of widespread intercourse synchronously with one of territorial expansion and extensive emigration, form one of those apparently irreconcilable contradictions constantly springing from the isolation and world-wide accessibility of an island environment; yet underlying Japan’s present receptivity of new ideas and her outwardly indiscriminate adoption of western civilization is to be detected the deep primal stamp of the Japanese character, and an instinctive determination to preserve the core of that character intact.

[Sidenote:  Islands as nurseries and disseminators of distinctive civilizations.]