ere ever so
disgraceful a club!

Just at present, a crisis, full blown as a chrysanthemum, has developed
in the Imperial Diet. Both Houses accuse the Government of improper
interference--this Japanese for 'plenty stick and some bank-note'--at
the recent elections. They then did what was equivalent to passing a
vote of censure on the Ministry and refusing to vote government
measures. So far the wildest advocate of representative government could
have desired nothing better. Afterwards, things took a distinctly
Oriental turn. The Ministry refused to resign, and the Mikado prorogued
the Diet for a week to think things over. The Japanese papers are now at
issue over the event. Some say that representative government implies
party government, and others swear at large. The Overseas Club says for
the most part--'Skittles!'

It is a picturesque situation--one that suggests romances and
extravaganzas. Thus, imagine a dreaming Court intrenched behind a triple
line of moats where the lotus blooms in summer--a Court whose outer
fringe is aggressively European, but whose heart is Japan of long ago,
where a dreaming King sits among some wives or other things, amused from
time to time with magic-lantern shows and performing fleas--a holy King
whose sanctity is used to conjure with, and who twice a year gives
garden-parties where every one must come in top-hat and frock coat.
Round this Court, wavering between the splendours of the sleeping and
the variety shows of the Crystal Palace, place in furious but
carefully-veiled antagonism the fragments of newly shattered castes,
their natural Oriental eccentricities overlaid with borrowed Western
notions. Imagine now, a large and hungry bureaucracy, French in its
fretful insistence on detail where detail is of no earthly moment,
Oriental in its stress on etiquette and punctillo, recruited from a
military caste accustomed for ages past to despise alike farmer and
trader. This caste, we will suppose, is more or less imperfectly
controlled by a syndicate of three clans, which supply their own
nominees to the Ministry. These are adroit, versatile, and unscrupulous
men, hampered by no western prejudice in favour of carrying any plan to
completion. Through and at the bidding of these men, the holy Monarch
acts; and the acts are wonderful. To criticise these acts exists a
wild-cat Press, liable to suppression at any moment, as morbidly
sensitive to outside criticism as the American, and almost a