It has a gray, pale cover with a chrysanthemum at
the back, and a Japanese told me then, 'Now we have Constitution same as
other countries, and so it is all right. Now we are quite civilised
because of Constitution.'
[A perfectly irrelevant story comes to mind here. Do you know that in
Madeira once they had a revolution which lasted just long enough for the
national poet to compose a national anthem, and then was put down? All
that is left of the revolt now is the song that you hear on the
twangling nachettes, the baby-banjoes, of a moonlight night under the
banana fronds at the back of Funchal. And the high-pitched nasal refrain
of it is 'Consti-tuci-oun!']
Since that auspicious date it seems that the questions have
impertinently come up, and the first and the last of them is that of
Treaty Revision. Says the Japanese Government, 'Only obey our laws, our
new laws that we have carefully compiled from all the wisdom of the
West, and you shall go up country as you please and trade where you
will, instead of living cooped up in concessions and being judged by
consuls. Treat us as you would treat France or Germany, and we will
treat you as our own subjects.'
Here, as you know, the matter rests between the two thousand foreigners
and the forty million Japanese - a God-send to all editors of Tokio and
Yokohama, and the despair of the newly arrived in whose nose, remember,
is the smell of the East, One and Indivisible, Immemorial, Eternal, and,
above all, Instructive.
