t possible for the traveller to come
and go from hotel to hotel, to get his passport for inland travel, to
telegraph his safe arrival to anxious friends, and generally enjoy
himself much more than he would have been able to do in his own country.
Government and gunboats may open a land, but it is the men of the
Overseas Club that keep it open. Their reward (not alone in Japan) is
the bland patronage or the scarcely-veiled contempt of those who profit
by their labours. It is hopeless to explain to a traveller who has been
'ohayoed' into half-a-dozen shops and 'sayonaraed' out of half-a-dozen
more and politely cheated in each one, that the Japanese is an Oriental,
and, therefore, embarrassingly economical of the truth. 'That's his
politeness,' says the traveller. 'He does not wish to hurt your
feelings. Love him and treat him like a brother, and he'll change.' To
treat one of the most secretive of races on a brotherly basis is not
very easy, and the natural politeness that enters into a signed and
sealed contract and undulates out of it so soon as it does not
sufficiently pay is more than embarrassing. It is almost annoying. The
want of fixity or commercial honour may be due to some natural infirmity
of the artistic temperament, or to the manner in which the climate has
affected, and his ruler has ruled, the man himself for untold centuries.

Those who know the East know, where the system of 'squeeze,' which is
commission, runs through every transaction of life, from the sale of a
groom's place upward, where the woman walks behind the man in the
streets, and where the peasant gives you for the distance to the next
town as many or as few miles as he thinks you will like, that these
things must be so. Those who do not know will not be persuaded till they
have lived there. The Overseas Club puts up its collective nose
scornfully when it hears of the New and Regenerate Japan sprung to life
since the 'seventies. It grins, with shame be it written, at an Imperial
Diet modelled on the German plan and a Code Napoleon a la Japonaise. It
is so far behind the New Era as to doubt that an Oriental country,
ridden by etiquette of the sternest, and social distinctions almost as
hard as those of caste, can be turned out to Western gauge in the
compass of a very young man's fife. And it _must_ be prejudiced, because
it is daily and hourly in contact with the Japanese, except when it can
do business with the Chinaman whom it prefers. Was th