ystem of education and the same "classics," and each was
composed of followers of Confucius and believers in Buddhism. True,
Japan was then under the feudal system, and China and Korea were and
still are under monarchy, but in point of absolutism, their
governments were all alike. The greater differentiations were the
facts that the Japanese had their own system of religious belief
besides, called Shintoism, that the Japanese and the Koreans each had,
in addition to the Chinese characters, their own syllables, and that
the styles of their dress were different in no small degree. But the
former, being a belief, principally concerned with the hereafter, has
no more connection than the latter two with the subject of our
inquiry, which relates to the intellectual phases of these people only
in so far as they influence their political ideas.

[8] Peschel's, "The Races of Man," p. 163.

2. Nor can we find any peculiar characteristic in the Japanese people,
to which we may ascribe their progressive tendency. The only
predominant characteristic that we know is their imitative power. This
they have remarkably exhibited in their adoption of the Chinese
civilization, which they modified and made their own, and more
remarkably in their recent adoption of the Western civilization. Let
us examine what relation this bears to the conservative and the
progressive spirit of the people. Mr. Herbert Spencer attributes two
motives to imitation, either reverential or competitive.[9] It is with
the latter that we are concerned. This, coming as it does from a
desire of an imitator to assert his equality with the one imitated,
implies the recognition of superiority of the latter, and the
acknowledgment of inferiority of the former. Conservatism, in the
sense we have been using the term, defies any recognition and
acknowledgment of this sort; therefore it defies imitation. In other
words, a man does not imitate what he dislikes or scorns, and since
conservatism is aversion to, or contempt for, say a new political
institution, the imitative trait has no part to play, while that
aversion or contempt continues. Evidently, then, the imitative power
of the Japanese was not the force which served to make the
conservative people progressive; only when conservatism gives way, and
admiration for what is new is awakened, can this power assume its full
activity.

[9] "His Principle of Sociology," Vol. II., p. 209.

Were we to admit for the