foreigners, his mature age with the settlement of all the institutions that go to make up modern Japan. He was a Samurai from one of the southern provinces, poor, and left an orphan at an early age. But he made his way first to Ōsaka, where Dutch was taught in semi-privacy under plea of the study of medicine, then in 1858 to Yedo. One of the most striking pages in his striking Autobiography is where he tells of his disappointment on discovering, by a visit to the then infant settlement of Yokohama, that the language current among the merchants was not Dutch, but English. Nothing daunted, he tackled the new task. At that period, anti-foreign feeling still ran high; all persons who showed any leaning towards alien ways were ipso facto suspects liable to personal violence. Nevertheless, translations of various foreign works and documents had gradually become a necessity of the times. Fukuzawa undertook them, and made himself so useful that he was attached to the staff of the first embassy which was sent abroad in 1860. But on returning to his native shores, he thenceforth steadily declined all connection with officialdom, and resumed—never more to drop it—the self-imposed task of enlightening his countrymen, detaching them from Orientalism, Europeanising them, or, it might be better said, Americanising them,—for America was ever his cynosure among Western lands. The democracy which he had found there, the simple family life, and also, it must be owned, the common-sense empiricism, the "Franklinism" (if one may so style it) of America exactly suited his keen, practical, but some what pedestrian intellect. The strong devotional bent of Anglo-Saxondom struck no sympathetic chord in his heart. He always regarded religion as mere leading-strings for the ignorant. Spencer's agnostic philosophy attracted him on its negative side; but almost his whole activity displayed itself in a utilitarian direction,—in teaching his countrymen how to construct electric batteries, how to found cannon, how to study such practical sciences as geography and elementary physics, to acquire such knowledge concerning foreign institutions as could be put to use
