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JAPANESE REFORM.

For the last two decades the career of Japan has been startlingly acrobatic. Ever, since 1868, when she made her great evolutionary somersault over the backs of 'six centuries, from a feudal state into the arena oi modern life, she has been turning,her, whole social system topsy-turvy, in, 'her .haste to be fully abreast of the latter end of the nineteenth century ; and the rest of the world has wondered at the 1 feat. .

Unfortunately for this really remarkable performance, Dame Nature is not addicted to jumps herself, and objects to them in her offspring ; such lapse of continuity forming no part of the maternal scheme of education. In her domestic curriculum, progress of the kind is 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 has set too far asunder. We are witness to this in everyday 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 intermarriage, 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 fruitlessness 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, the . almost inevitable tendency is to the dyin? out of the family. In physique, the human gap between the opposite sides of our world is already too wide to be crossed. Yet anatomically the variance is trivial. A slig-bfc difference in the sotting of the eye, one or two other variations, not more important, and you have the extent 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 1

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 outradicalled the Radicals ot any other land, and even the Opposition has had its brpath 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 empirics. A handful of men'j educated in European modes of thought, has revolutionised not simply the 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.

Permanent link to this item

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BH18910508.2.33

Bibliographic details

Bruce Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 2263, 8 May 1891, Page 6

Word Count
513

JAPANESE REFORM. Bruce Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 2263, 8 May 1891, Page 6

JAPANESE REFORM. Bruce Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 2263, 8 May 1891, Page 6

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