A Suffrage Sensation.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18917, 4 February 1927, Page 10

A Suffrage Sensation.

To the extent to which the Chinese trouble is political it is politics, so to speak, in vacuo. Not only are the Chinese people without votes: they arc without the desire for votes, and might easily go another hundred j'enre before the desire i 3 felt; or so at least it would seem safe to suppose. But it would have seemed safe to say the same of Japan forty years ago, and already, we learn from the mails to hand yesterday, the Japanese arc getting ready for a general election in which every man over twenty-five will have his say. This, and not the threatened war in China, is the real Eastern sensation for those whose eyes can see far enough, or indeed see past their political noses. For universal manhood suffrage has never before been heard of in the East within the limits of history. It is a political tidal wave of which there has been no warning, and for which, therefore, no one has made a day's preparation. More extraordinary still, there has been no longing for it, no expressed desire for it, no organised agitation for it. In English, American, and European history Parliamentary government has been what one of the Japanese papers in announcing the new suffrage law calls "the blood-prize of many long "bitter struggles of the people for "their political rights"; but the people of Japan have made no light at .all for universal suffrage. Under their first election law of 1890, only five hundred thousand men in the whole Empire were given a vote—the few who, being twenty-five years of age or more, paid a direct national tax of at least 15 yen (about 30s). Ten years later the property qualification was lowered from 15 to 10 yen, and the number of voters increased to a million and a half. In 1920 the tax requirement, though it was now reduced to three yen, still did not permit more than 21 millions to vote; but the masses were quite content. And now, by Imperial Rescript, the tax requirement is abolished altogether, with the result that at least ten, and probably twelve or thirteen, millions of male citizens who had no idea of voting twelve months ago arrive dramatically upon the political stage with all the rights and privileges of men accustomed to representative government for generations. What will happen to them all and to Japan it is impossible to say, partly because emotion is stronger than reason in every multitude, but especially because Japanese multitudes have been trained from time immemorial to follow their leaders blindly. The comment of the Japan Chronicle is interesting: 'Only c " political miracle," it says, " can save "them from a thousand and one big |" and little blunders in the first great I "dawn-break; but of emirs*; blunders I" ere not the greatest evils, for of such I "is th* kingdom o? experience and

"through it of perfection—if time "enough be granted." Time ia certainly a great healer, a great settler, a great corrector, hut most of us will not live long enough to see the end of the experiment, and it is difficult not to wonder what the prelimitinry explosions are going t« I" 1 .