Somewhere in the background of the stage are the people of the land - of
whom a very limited proportion enjoy the privileges of representative
government.
Whether in the past few years they have learned what the
thing means, or, learning, have the least intention of making any use of
it, is not clear. Meantime, the game of government goes forward as
merrily as a game of puss-in-the-corner, with the additional joy that
not more than half-a-dozen men know who is controlling it or what in
the wide world it intends to do. In Tokio live the steadily-diminishing
staff of Europeans employed by the Emperor as engineers, railway
experts, professors in the colleges and so forth. Before many years they
will all be dispensed with, and the country will set forth among the
nations alone and on its own responsibility.
In fifty years then, from the time that the intrusive American first
broke her peace, Japan will experience her new birth and, reorganised
from sandal to top-knot, play the samisen in the march of modern
progress. This is the great advantage of being born into the New Era,
when individual and community alike can get something for nothing - pay
without work, education without effort, religion' without thought, and
free government without slow and bitter toil.
The Overseas Club, as has been said, is behind the spirit of the age. It
has to work for what it gets, and it does not always get what it works
for. Nor can its members take ship and go home when they please. Imagine
for a little, the contented frame of mind that is bred in a man by the
perpetual contemplation of a harbour full of steamers as a Piccadilly
cab-rank of hansoms. The weather is hot, we will suppose; something has
gone wrong with his work that day, or his children are not looking so
well as might be. Pretty tiled bungalows, bowered in roses and wistaria,
do not console him, and the voices of the politest people on earth jar
sorely. He knows every soul in the club, has thoroughly talked out
every subject of interest, and would give half a year's - oh, five
years' - pay for one lung-filling breath of air that has life in it, one
sniff of the haying grass, or half a mile of muddy London street where
the muffin bell tinkles in the four o'clock fog. Then the big liner
moves out across the staring blue of the bay. So-and-so and such-an-one,
both friends, are going home in her, and some one else goes next week by
the French mail. He, and he alone, it seems to him, must stay on; and it
is so maddeningly easy to go - for every one save himself. The boat's
smoke dies out along the horizon, and he is left alone with the warm
wind and the white dust of the Bund. Now Japan is a good place, a place
that men swear by and live in for thirty years at a stretch.
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