Japanese Reform.

Auckland Star, Volume XXII, Issue 95, 25 April 1891, Page 4 (Supplement)

Japanese Reform.

For the last two decades the career of Japan has been etartlingly acrobaticEver since 1868, when 6he made her great evolutionary somersault over the backs of six centuries, from a feudal state into the arena of modern life, she has been turning her whole social system topsy-turvy, in her haste to be fully abreaet of the latter end of tho nineteenth century; and the rest of the world has wondered at the feat.

Unfortunately for this really remarkable performance, Dame Nature is not addicted to jumps herself, and objects to them in her offspring; such iapse of continuity forming no part of the maternal scheme of education. In her domestic curriculum progress of the kind in inadmissible. Not simply is development necessarily contiguous, but different lines of life can only be linked while still relatively close. Nature never joins what time hath set too far asunder. We are witness to this in every day physical reproduction. Extremes will not mate.

Symptoms of failure appear when the civilised weds with the savage. The savagery, however, is not in itself the bar. That it seems to be so is because, in most other cases of racial inter-marriage, the couple are both of Aryan blood, and therefore cousins of no very distant degree. The real barrier consists not in dissimilarity of customs, but in dissimilarity of descent. In other words, not the want of development of the one only, but the difference in development of the two determines the fruitlessnese of their connection.

A well-known foreign physician in Tokyo has found that among Eurasians, those, that is, half of European, half of Asiatic blood, tho almost inevitable tendency is to the dying oub of the family. In physique, the human gap between tha opposite sides of our world is already too wide to be crpseod. Yet) anatomically tho variance ia trivial. A slight difference in the Eetting of tho eye, one or two other variations, not more important, and you have the oxtenb of the contrast. Psychically, the opposition is much more marked ; for it causes that strange inversion so striking to the one people in the other. If, then, in body, where science can detect so trifling , a divergence, Nature finds an impassable gulf, what must her difficulty be in mind ? If intermarriage prove barren, will intercommunion of thought bear fruit?

No such doubts, however, have disturbed Japan's leading men. Quite oblivious to a possible impossibility, they have foisted foreign customs upon their country wholesale. The Government has outradicaled the Radicals of any other land, and even the Opposition has had its breath so taken away by the speed of the change as to have had none left with which to remonstrate. The Government, indeed, has been a most remarkable experiment in empires. A handful of men, educated in European modes of thought, has revolutionised nofc simply tte political, but the social, the domestic, even the private customs of an entire community. The only point more surprising still has been the enthusiastic acceptance of the same by the thinking classes. —' Atlantic Monthly. ,