were also moving in the same direction. Suddenly again, Japanese public opinion—if that term may be employed, for want of a better, to denote the views of the comparatively small number of persons who in the Japan of those days thought and spoke on political subjects,—Japanese public opinion, we say, veered round. Among the new stipulations had been one to the effect that four foreign judges—not twenty-five—were to assist the native bench during the first few years following on treaty revision. This stipulation was denounced on all hands as contrary to the terms of the new Constitution, which had just been proclaimed. But the real objection lay elsewhere, and had its root in panic at the idea of Japan being thrown open to foreign trade and residence. For years the opening of the country had been prayed for as a blessing to trade, a means of attracting foreign capital to the mines and industries, a means of making Japanese manners and institutions conform to what were almost universally admitted to be the superior manners and customs of the West. The same anticipations remained, but the inferences drawn from them were reversed. Japan, it was now feverishly asserted, would be swamped by foreign immigration, her national customs would be destroyed, her mines, her industries would all come under foreign control, her very soil would, by lease or purchase, pass into foreign hands, her people would be practically enslaved, and independent Japan would exist no more. Such were the sentiments given voice to in every private conversation, and re-echoed daily in the press. Nevertheless the Japanese Government, more enlightened than the Japanese public, endeavoured to continue the negotiations for treaty revision. Popular excitement then began to seek more violent vents. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Count Ōkuma, had his leg blown off by a dynamite bomb. It became evident in October, 1889, that negotiations could no longer be carried on consistently with the public peace, and the Government once more drew back. Even those treaties which had already been concluded with
