pe, the world has outlived. I look for the lily flowering
over the fields of peace.

IV

DIVINE RIGHT IN JAPAN

When Japan was opened to the West, after more than two centuries of
seclusion, she was in possession of a national spirit which had been
enabled, by isolation, to become and remain simple and homogeneous. All
public feeling, all public morals centred about the divinity of the
Emperor; an idea which, by a process unique in history, had hibernated
through centuries of political obscuration, and emerged again to the
light with its prestige unimpaired in the middle of the nineteenth
century. In the Emperor, one may say, Japan was incarnate. And to this
faith the Japanese, as well as foreign observers, attribute their great
achievement in the Russian War. The little book of Captain Sakurai,
_Human Bullets_, testifies to this fact in every sentence: "Through the
abundant grace of Heaven and the illustrious virtue of his Majesty, the
Imperial forces defeated the great enemy both on land and sea." ... "I
jumped out of bed, cleansed my person with pure water, donned my best
uniform, bowed to the East where the great Sire resides, solemnly read
his proclamation of war, and told his Majesty that his humble subject
was just starting to the front. When I offered my last prayers--the last
I then believed they were--before the family shrine of my ancestors I
felt a thrill going all through me, as if they were giving me a solemn
injunction, saying: 'Thou art not thy own. For his Majesty's sake, thou
shalt go to save the nation from calamity, ready to bear the crushing of
thy bones and the tearing of thy flesh. Disgrace not thy ancestors by an
act of cowardice.'" This, it is clear, is an attitude quite different
from that of an Englishman towards the King. The King, to us, is at most
a symbol. The Emperor, to the Japanese, is, or was, a god. And the
difference may be noted in small matters. For instance, a Japanese,
writing from England, observes with astonishment that we put the head of
the King on our stamps and cover it with postmarks. That, to a Japanese,
seems to be blasphemy. Again, he is puzzled, at the Coronation in
Westminster Abbey, to find the people looking down from above on the
King. That, again, seems to him blasphemy. Last year, when the Emperor
was dying, crowds knelt hour after hour, day and night, on the road
beside the palace praying for him. And a photographer who took a picture
of them by flash