tural
selection has there taken place. The orderly procedure of natural
evolution was disastrously supplemented by man. For the fact that in
the growth of their tree of knowledge the branches developed out of all
proportion to the trunk is due to a practice of culture-grafting.

From before the time when they began to leave records of their actions
the Japanese have been a nation of importers, not of merchandise, but of
ideas. They have invariably shown the most advanced free-trade spirit
in preferring to take somebody else's ready-made articles rather than
to try to produce any brand-new conceptions themselves. They continue
to follow the same line of life. A hearty appreciation of the things of
others is still one of their most winning traits. What they took they
grafted bodily upon their ancestral tree, which in consequence came to
present a most unnaturally diversified appearance. For though not unlike
other nations in wishing to borrow, if their zeal in the matter was
slightly excessive, they were peculiar in that they never assimilated
what they took. They simply inserted it upon the already existing
growth. There it remained, and throve, and blossomed, nourished by that
indigenous Japanese sap, taste. But like grafts generally, the foreign
boughs were not much modified by their new life-blood, nor was the tree
in its turn at all affected by them. Connected with it only as separable
parts of its structure, the cuttings might have been lopped off again
without influencing perceptibly the condition of the foster-parent stem.
The grafts in time grew to be great branches, but the trunk remained
through it all the trunk of a sapling. In other words, the nation grew
up to man's estate, keeping the mind of its childhood.

What is thus true of the Japanese is true likewise of the Koreans and of
the Chinese. The three peoples, indeed, form so many links in one long
chain of borrowing. China took from India, then Korea copied China, and
lastly Japan imitated Korea. In this simple manner they successively
became possessed of a civilization which originally was not the property
of any one of them. In the eagerness they all evinced in purloining
what was not theirs, and in the perfect content with which they then
proceeded to enjoy what they had taken, they remind us forcibly of
that happy-go-lucky class in the community which prefers to live on
questionable loans rather than work itself for a living. Like those same
individu