But some of his best-known productions are omitted from this count, because posterior to the year 1893. Such are the Autobiography[1] already cited, of which seventeen editions have already appeared, the Hundred Essays,[2] of which there have been no less than thirty-four editions, and three or four others. Indeed, so voluminous were his writings that he early found it advantageous to keep a printing-office for his own use. Two causes united to bring about this result. One was the (to a Japanese public) novelty and interest of the subjects treated; the other was an exceptionally lucid style. Fukuzawa tells us himself, in the Introduction to his collected works, that his constant endeavour had been to write so clearly that "not only every uneducated tradesman or peasant should understand him perfectly, but that even a servant-girl fresh from the country, chancing to hear a passage read aloud by some one on the other side of a screen, should carry away a good general notion of the sense." And he adds that he had been in the habit of submitting his writings to the test of comprehension by a neighbouring poor woman and her children, and of simplifying every expression at which they stumbled. Little wonder that an author so truly democratic should have achieved an unequalled popularity.
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Perhaps the reader may object that these pages, though labelled "Philosophy," have little or nothing about philosophy in them. We would remind him that we set out by hinting that, although the word "philosophy" may be found in Japanese dictionaries, the thing itself is scarcely Japanese. If we ask him, therefore, to put up with a makeshift, that is no more than what the Japanese themselves have habitually done.
Pidgin-Japanese. In China, where the native language is very difficult to pick up, and the natives themselves have a
