JAPAN
should lead the nation along all paths of progress. Their intellectual superiority entitled them to act as guides, and they had enjoyed exceptional opportunities of acquiring enlightenment by visits to Europe and America. But there were special considerations also. The Japanese people had long been in the habit of looking to the official class for all initiative. The term "official class" is, indeed, somewhat misleading in this context. "Educated class" would be a more accurate form of expression, for the samurai, who filled all the official posts, stood in that relation to the bulk of the nation. Readers of these pages are aware, further, that the character of the Government throughout the whole of the Tokugawa era had been essentially parental. Men had been taught to adjust their most trivial doings to the provisions of rules and regulations, and they had been further taught to abhor the very civilisation which it was now expedient they should adopt. Unprepared, on the one hand, to think and act for themselves, they were prepared, on the other, to think and act wrongly. The Government, therefore, did what was wise and right when it applied itself strenuously to push the nation into the desired path. To foreign onlookers, however, the spectacle thus presented was not without disquieting suggestions, for not only did they doubt the permanent strength of official leading strings, but also it seemed to them that the Government's reforms outstripped the nation's readiness for
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