h her patronage
our tobacco became widely known, so we call it by the name of Ima
Nakakoshi. And we beg to assure the public that it is as fragrant and
sweet as the young lady herself. Try it and you will find our words
prove true." Finally, over a pastry-cook's shop in Tokio he read and
made a note of the following: "Cakes and Infections."

Now what do these several trivial, indeed contemptible, anecdotes
prove? What arguments in regard to a nation of forty-seven millions of
people can be bolstered up by instancing the imperfect acquaintance of
a Japanese pastry-cook with the English language? The writer does not
in so many words delineate the future of Japan as it appears to him,
but he suggests it, and his Japan of the future is quite evidently to
be nothing more or less than a kind of international dustheap whereon
Europe and America have dumped all that is bad and rotten and
deplorable in their modern social and political life. Here is the
inferential forecast of the gentleman in question: "When Japan rings
with the rattle of machinery; when the railway has become a feature of
her scenery; when the boiler-chimney has defaced her choicest spots,
as the paper-makers have already obliterated the delights of Oji; when
the traditions of yashiki and shizoku alike are all finally engulfed
in the barrack-room; when her art reckons its output by the thousand
dozen; when the power in the land is shared between the politician and
the plutocrat; when the peasant has been exchanged for the 'factory
hand,' the kimono for the slop-suit, the tea-house for the music-hall,
the geisha for the lion comique, and the daimio for the
beer-peer--will Japan then have made a wise bargain, and will she,
looking backward, date a happier era from the day we forced our
acquaintance upon her at the cannon's mouth?"

[Illustration: A SIGN OF THE TIMES]

Criticism of this kind, if it may be dignified by that term, no doubt
affords opportunity for what is considered smart writing, and enables
the persons indulging in it to air their witticisms and show their
sense of the humorous, but it not only serves no useful purpose, but,
on the contrary, is pernicious in its effects, inasmuch as it
occasions, not unnaturally, a feeling of soreness on the part of
those, whether individuals or a nation, who are made the subject of
it. Japan has too often been the butt of the humourist. I have no
desire to deprecate humour, which no doubt gives a savour to l