cacy, they have as a people no peers. Art has been their mistress,
though science has never been their master. Perhaps for this very reason
that art, not science, has been the Muse they courted, the result has
been all the more widespread. For culture there is not the attainment
of the few, but the common property of the people. If the peaks of
intellect rise less eminent, the plateau of general elevation stands
higher. But little need be said to prove the civilization of a land
where ordinary tea-house girls are models of refinement, and common
coolies, when not at work, play chess for pastime.

If Japanese ways look odd at first sight, they but look more odd on
closer acquaintance. In a land where, to allow one's understanding the
freer play of indoor life, one begins, not by taking off his hat, but by
removing his boots, he gets at the very threshold a hint that humanity
is to be approached the wrong end to. When, after thus entering a
house, he tries next to gain admittance to the mind of its occupant, the
suspicion becomes a certainty. He discovers that this people talk, so
to speak, backwards; that before he can hope to comprehend them, or
make himself understood in return, he must learn to present his thoughts
arranged in inverse order from the one in which they naturally suggest
themselves to his mind. His sentences must all be turned inside out. He
finds himself lost in a labyrinth of language. The same seems to be true
of the thoughts it embodies. The further he goes the more obscure the
whole process becomes, until, after long groping about for some means of
orienting himself, he lights at last upon the clue. This clue consists
in "the survival of the unfittest."

In the civilization of Japan we have presented to us a most interesting
case of partially arrested development; or, to speak esoterically,
we find ourselves placed face to face with a singular example of a
completed race-life. For though from our standpoint the evolution of
these people seems suddenly to have come to an end in mid-career,
looked at more intimately it shows all the signs of having fully run its
course. Development ceased, not because of outward obstruction, but from
purely intrinsic inability to go on. The intellectual machine was not
shattered; it simply ran down. To this fact the phenomenon owes its
peculiar interest. For we behold here in the case of man the same
spectacle that we see cosmically in the case of the moon, the specta