ondon streets, in order to identify
and correct them on the Oxford papers, distributed with Olympian
impartiality to all parts of the Empire. Such insularity of mind seems
to justify Bernard Shaw's description of Britain as an island whose
natives regard its manners and customs as laws of nature. Yet these are
the people who in the Nile Valley have become masters of irrigation,
unsurpassed even by the ancient Egyptians; who, in the snow-wrapped
forests of Hudson Bay, are trappers and hunters unequalled by the
Indians; who, in the arid grasslands of Australia, pasture their herds
like nomad shepherd or American cowboy, and in the Tropics loll like the
natives, but somehow manage to do a white man's stint of work.

[Sidenote: The case of Japan.]

In Japan, isolation has excluded or reduced to controllable measure
every foreign force that might break the continuity of the national
development or invade the integrity of the national ideal. Japan has
always borrowed freely from neighboring Asiatic countries and recently
from the whole world; yet everything in Japan bears the stamp of the
indigenous. The introduction of foreign culture into the Empire has been
a process of selection and profound modification to accord with the
national ideals and needs.[819] Buddhism, coming from the continent, was
Japanized by being grafted on to the local stock of religious ideas, so
that Japanese Buddhism is strongly differentiated from the continental
forms of that religion.[820] The seventeenth century Catholicism of the
Jesuits, before it was hospitably received, had to be adapted to
Japanese standards of duty and ritual. Modern Japanese converts to
Christianity wish themselves to conduct the local missions and teach a
national version of the new faith.[821] But all the while, Japanese
religion has experienced no real change of heart. The core of the
national faith is the indigenous Shinto cult, which no later interloper
has been permitted to dislodge or seriously to transform; and this has
survived, wrapped in the national consciousness, wedded to the national
patriotism, lifted above competition. Here is insular conservatism.

Japan's sudden and complete abandonment of a policy of seclusion which
had been rigidly maintained for two hundred and fifty years, and her
entrance upon a career of widespread intercourse synchronously with one
of territorial expansion and extensive emigration, form one of those
apparently irreconcilable cont