h of manhood and womanhood, as well as government by
discussion. Japan has thus, by imitation rather than by origination,
entered on the path of endless progress.

So important, however, is the step recently taken that further
analysis of this method of progress is desirable for its full
comprehension. We have already noted quite briefly[F] how Japan was
supplied by the West with the ideal of national unity and the material
instruments essential to its attainment. In connection with the high
development of the nation as a whole, these two elements of progress,
the ideal and the material, need further consideration.

We note in the first place that both begin with imitation, but if
progress is to be real and lasting, both must grow to independence.

The first and by far the most important is the psychical, the
introduction of new ideas. So long as the old, familiar ideas hold
sway over the mind of a nation, there is little or no stimulus to
comparison and discussion. Stagnation is well-nigh complete. But let
new ideas be so introduced as to compel attention and comprehension,
and the mind spontaneously awakes to wonderful activity. The old
stagnation is no longer possible. Discussion is started; and in the
end something must take place, even if the new ideas are not accepted
wholly or even in part. But they will not gain attention if presented
simply in the abstract, unconnected with real life. They must bring
evidence that, if accepted and lived, they will be of practical use,
that they will give added power to the nation.

Exactly this took place in 1854 when Admiral Perry demanded entrance
to Japan. The people suddenly awoke from their sleep of two and a half
centuries to find that new nations had arisen since they closed their
eyes, nations among which new sets of ideas had been at work, giving
them a power wholly unknown to the Orient and even mysterious to it.
Those ideas were concerned, not alone with the making of guns, the
building of ships, the invention of machinery, the taming and using of
the forces of nature, but also with methods of government and law,
with strange notions, too, about religion and duty, about the family
and the individual, which the foreigners said were of inestimable
value and importance. It needed but a few years of intercourse with
Western peoples to convince the most conservative that unless the
Japanese themselves could gain the secret of their power, either by
adopting their weap