storical epoch, but a new act in the long drama of
human evolution itself. Curious, too, it is to observe how the strange
world-destiny that shapes our ends gave to it a stage-setting in
keeping with its dramatic significance. Not to England, nor to any
other great naval and commercial Power of the time, but to the young
United States--the nation that had found the ultimate West--came the
unlikely but strangely fitting task of opening the Farthest East to
Western trade and thought.

When at last the world has grown old and nations and empires not yet
formed shall themselves have gone the mortal way common alike to human
creatures and human creations, I think the far historian will record
few events either more dramatic or more pregnant with undreamed-of
meaning than Perry's entrance into Japanese waters just five years
after the discovery of gold in California had ended the world-old
drama of our westward march.

So to-day, as I have said, the full tides of Orient and Occident have
rushed together in Japan, and it is not merely a land of curious
customs and strange phenomena, but a land in which the contrasts exist
side by side, and most interesting of all, a land of strangely
mingling social and industrial currents. East and West have met, and
we wait to see what forces in each shall prevail when the shock of
their fierce encounter shall have passed. For it is not merely Japan,
but all Asia, whose future may be affected by the outcome of the new,
tense struggle here between the ideals of West and East.

As on the streets of Tokyo and Yokahoma the Japanese {59} in European
dress jostles his brother in native garb, as streams of men in coats
and trousers and shoes mingle with men wearing kimonas, hikamas, and
getas, so in the minds of the people the teachings of modern science
and Confucian classic meet; the faith of the Christian grapples with
the faith of the Buddhist; the masterful aspirations of Western
civilization surge against the old placidity of the East.

What shall be the outcome? Upon nothing else, it seems to me, depends
so much as upon the religious foundation upon which Japan seeks to
build the structure of her newer and richer life. Many of her people,
if I may change the figure, are seeking to put the new wine of
Christian civilization into the old bottles of Shinto and Buddhist
ritualism. That this must fail is, I think, self-evident. Many others,
like the iconoclasts of the French Revolution, would