The Imaginative Eye Can See The Most
Unpleasant Possibilities, From A General Overrunning Of Japan By The
Chinaman, Who Is
Far the most important foreign resident, to the
shelling of Tokio by a joyous and bounding Democracy, anxious to
vindicate
Her national honour and to learn how her newly-made navy
works.
But there are scores of arguments that would confute and overwhelm this
somewhat gloomy view. The statistics of Japan, for instance, are as
beautiful and fit as neatly as the woodwork of her houses. By these it
would be possible to prove anything.
SOME EARTHQUAKES
A Radical Member of Parliament at Tokio has just got into trouble with
his constituents, and they have sent him a priceless letter of reproof.
Among other things they point out that a politician should not be 'a
waterweed which wobbles hither and thither according to the motion of
the stream.' Nor should he 'like a ghost without legs drift along before
the wind.' 'Your conduct,' they say, 'has been both of a waterweed and a
ghost, and we purpose in a little time to give you proof of our true
Japanese spirit.' That member will very likely be mobbed in his
'rickshaw and prodded to inconvenience with sword-sticks; for the
constituencies are most enlightened. But how in the world can a man
under these sides behave except as a waterweed and a ghost? It is in the
air - the wobble and the legless drift An energetic tourist would have
gone to Hakodate, seen Ainos at Sapporo, ridden across the northern
island under the gigantic thistles, caught salmon, looked in at
Vladivostock, and done half a hundred things in the time that one lazy
loafer has wasted watching the barley turn from green to gold, the
azaleas blossom and burn out, and the spring give way to the warm rains
of summer.
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