gest our line of thought by asking what is the fundamental
element of civilization? Does it consist in the manifold appliances
that render life luxurious; the railroad, the telegraph, the post
office, the manufactures, the infinite variety of mechanical and other
conveniences? Or is it not rather the social and intellectual and
ethical state of a people? Manifestly the latter. The tools indeed of
civilization may be imported into a half-civilized, or barbarous
country; such importation, however, does not render the country
civilized, although it may assist greatly in the attainment of that
result. Civilization being mental, social, and ethical, can arise only
through the growth of the mind and character of the vast multitudes of
a nation. Now has Japan imported only the tools of civilization? In
other words, is her new civilization only external, formal, nominal,
unreal? That she has imported much is true. Yet that her attainments
and progress rest on her social, intellectual, and ethical development
will become increasingly clear as we take up our successive chapters.
Under the new environment of the past fifty years, this growth,
particularly in intellectual, in industrial, and in political lines,
has been exceedingly rapid as compared with the growths of other
peoples.

This conception of the rise of New Japan will doubtless approve itself
to every educated man who will allow his thought to rest upon the
subject. For all human progress, all organic evolution, proceeds by
the progressive modification of the old organs under new conditions.
The modern locomotive did not spring complete from the mind of James
Watt; it is the result of thousands of years of human experience and
consequent evolution, beginning first perhaps with a rolling log,
becoming a rude cart, and being gradually transformed by successive
inventions until it has become one of the marvels of the nineteenth
century. It is impossible for those who have attained the view-point
of modern science to conceive of discontinuous progress; of
continually rising types of being, of thought, or of moral life, in
which the higher does not find its ground and root and thus an
important part of its explanation, in the lower. Such is the case not
only with reference: to biological evolution; it is especially true of
social evolution. He who would understand the Japan of to-day cannot
rest with the bare statement that her adoption of the tools and
materials of Western