Now it is important to note that as early as 1874—­that is six years after the Restoration of the Emperor Meiji—­these facts were attracting the widest notice in Japanese society, the agitation for a Constitution and a popular assembly being very vigourously pushed.  Led by the well-known and aristocratic Itagaki, Japanese Liberalism had joined battle with out-and-out Imperialism more than a quarter of a century ago; and although the question of recovering Tariff and Judicial autonomy and revising the Foreign Treaties was more urgent in those days, the foreign question was often pushed aside by the fierceness of the constitutional agitation.

It was not, however, until 1889 that a Constitution was finally granted to the Japanese—­that instrument being a gift from the Crown, and nothing more than a conditional warrant to a limited number of men to become witnesses of the processes of government but in no sense its controllers.  The very first Diet summoned in 1890 was sufficient proof of that.  A collision at once occurred over questions of finance which resulted in the resignation of the Ministry.  And ever since those days, that is for twenty-seven consecutive years, successive Diets in Japan have been fighting a forlorn fight for the power which can never be theirs save by revolution, it being only natural that Socialism should come to be looked upon by the governing class as Nihilism, whilst the mob-threat has been very acute ever since the Tokio peace riots of 1905.

Now it is characteristic of the ceremonial respect which all Japanese have for the Throne that all through this long contest the main issue should have been purposely obscured.  The traditional feelings of veneration which a loyal and obedient people feel for a line of monarchs, whose origin is lost in the mists of antiquity, are such that they have turned what is in effect an evergrowing struggle against the archaic principle of divine right into a contest with clan-leaders whom they assert are acting “unconstitutionally” whenever they choose to assert the undeniable principles of the Constitution.  Thus to-day we have this paradoxical situation:  that although Japanese Liberalism must from its very essence be revolutionary, i.e., destructive before it can hope to be constructive, it feigns blindness, hoping that by suasion rather than by force the principle of parliamentary government will somehow be grafted on to the body politic and the emperors, being left outside the controversy, become content to accept a greatly modified rule.

This hope seems a vain one in the light of all history.  Militarism and the clans are by no means in the last ditch in Japan, and they will no more surrender their power than would the Russian bureaucracy.  The only argument which is convincing in such a case is the last one which is ever used; and the mere mention of it by so-called socialists is sufficient to cause summary arrest in Japan.  Sheltering themselves