representative enough, is earnestly requested to supplement it, either from his personal experience or from his reading. For our own part, we cannot but -feel surprise at the way in which, like sheep jumping over a fence, one writer after another has enlarged on certain traits as characteristic of the Japanese nation, which history shows to be characteristic merely of the stage through which the nation is now passing. Their modern fervour of loyalty is a good case in point:—Europe manifested exactly the same symptom on her emergence from feudalism.
Just one consideration more: how do our characteristics strike the Japanese? From hints dropped by several of the educated, and from the still more interesting, because frankly naive, remarks made by Japanese servants whom the present writer has taken with him to Europe at different times, he thinks he may state that the travelled Japanese consider our three most prominent characteristics to be dirt, laziness, and superstition. As to the comparative dirtiness, there can be no doubt in any unprejudiced mind. You yourself, honoured Madam, of course take your tub regularly every morning. But are you so sure that your butler, your coachman, even your lady's maid, as regularly take theirs? Again, what is a stranger who hails from a land of fifteen working hours daily and of well-nigh three hundred and sixty-five working days yearly, to conclude from the habits of European artisans and servants, from post-offices closed on Sundays either totally or during portions of the day, etc., etc.? With regard to superstition, that is a matter of individual opinion. Of our poetry, our music, our metaphysics, our interest in all manner of things scattered over the two worlds of sense and thought, the Japanese visitor to Western lands can naturally notice little and appreciate less. Neither our pictures nor our cathedrals touch any chord in his heart. On the other hand, all our materially useful inventions are already shared by his countrymen, who work them—if not quite as well—at any rate more cheaply than we do, and in ways more suitable to their peculiar needs. For all these and yet other reasons, Europe and America make a far less favourable impression on
