e readiness of the people to fight for them in case of their being
endangered."

3. When the people are not willing and able to fulfil the duties and
discharge the functions which it imposes on them.

4. When the people have not learned the first lesson of obedience.

5. When the people are too passive; when they are ready to submit to
tyranny.

Now when we look at the Japan of 1871, even her greatest admirers must
admit that she was far from being able to fulfil the social conditions
necessary for the success of representative government. Japan was
obedient, but too submissive. She had not yet learned the first
lesson of freedom, that is, when and how to resist, in the faith that
resistance to tyrants is obedience to truth; that the irrepressible
kicker against tyranny, as Dr. Wilson observes, is the only true
freeman. In her conservative, almost abject submission, Japan was
yet unfit for free government. The Japanese people were willing to
do almost anything suggested by their Emperor, but they had first to
learn what was meant by representative government, "to understand
its processes and requirements." The Japanese had to discard many old
habits and prejudices, reform many defects of national character, and
undergo many stages of moral and mental discipline before they could
acclimatize themselves to the free atmosphere of representative
institutions. This preparation required a period of little over two
decades, and was effected not only through political discipline, but
by corresponding development in the moral, intellectual, social, and
industrial life of the nation.

I remarked in the beginning that the political activity of a nation is
not isolated from other spheres of its activities, but that there is a
mutual interchange of action and reaction among the different factors
of social life, so that to trace the political life of a nation it is
not only necessary to describe the organ through which it acts, the
governmental machinery, and the methods by which it is worked, but
to know "the forces which move it and direct its course." Now these
forces are political as well as non-political. This truth is now
generally acknowledged by constitutional writers. Thus, the English
author of "The American Commonwealth" devotes over one-third of his
second volume to the account of non-political institutions, and says
"there are certain non-political institutions, certain aspects of
society, certain intellectual or s