students were beginning to resort to the universities and schools of
the West; and although the conservatism of the Chinese mind was very
slow to make the plunge, it was already plain that this vast hive of
patient, clever, and industrious men was bound to enter the orbit of
Western civilisation.

Meanwhile, after a longer and stiffer resistance, Japan had made up her
mind to a great change with amazing suddenness and completeness. There
had been some preliminary relations with the Western peoples, beginning
with the visits of the American Commodore Perry in 1853 and 1854, and a
few ports had been opened to European trade. But then came a sudden,
violent reaction (1862). The British embassy was attacked; a number of
British subjects were murdered; a mixed fleet of British, French,
Dutch, and American ships proved the power of Western arms, and Japan
began to awaken to the necessity of adopting, in self-defence, the
methods of these intrusive foreigners. The story of the internal
revolution in Japan, which began in 1866, cannot be told here; enough
that it led to the most astounding change in history. Emerging from her
age-long isolation and from her contentment with her ancient,
unchanging modes of life, Japan realised that the future lay with the
restless and progressive civilisation of the West; and with a national
resolve to which there is no sort of parallel or analogy in history,
decided that she must not wait to be brought under subjection, but must
adopt the new methods and ideas for herself, if possible without
shedding too much of her ancient traditions. By a deliberate exercise
of the will and an extraordinary effort of organisation, she became
industrial without ceasing to be artistic; she adopted parliamentary
institutions without abandoning her religious veneration for the person
of the Mikado; she borrowed the military methods of the West without
losing the chivalrous and fatalist devotion of her warrior-caste; and
devised a Western educational system without disturbing the deep
orientalism of her mind. It was a transformation almost terrifying, and
to any Western quite bewildering, in its deliberation, rapidity, and
completeness. Europe long remained unconvinced of its reality. But in
1878 the work was, in its essentials, already achieved, and the one
state of non-European origin which has been able calmly to choose what
she would accept and what she would reject among the systems and
methods of the Wes