"I am afraid that we have not."
"Ah!"
He crushed me there, and I left very humbly, but cheered by the promise that the Tokio Public Opinion would contain an account of my words. Mercifully, that respectable journal is printed in Japanese, so the hash will not be served up to a large table. I would give a good deal to discover what meaning he attached to my forecast of Constitutional government in Japan.
"We all talk politics now." That was the sentence which remained to me. It was true talk. Men of the Educational Department in Tokio told me that the students would "talk politics" by the hour if you allowed them. At present they were talking in the abstract about their new plaything, the Constitution, with its Upper House and its Lower House, its committees, its questions of supply, its rules of procedure, and all the other skittles we have played with for six hundred years.
Japan is the second Oriental country which has made it impossible for a strong man to govern alone. This she has done of her own free will. India, on the other hand, has been forcibly ravished by the Secretary of State and the English M. P.
Japan is luckier than India.
No. XXI
SHOWS THE SIMILARITY BETWEEN THE BABU AND THE JAPANESE. CONTAINS THE EARNEST OUTCRY OF AN UNBELIEVER. THE EXPLANATION OF MR. SMITH OF CALIFORNIA AND ELSEWHERE. TAKES ME ON BOARD SHIP AFTER DUE WARNING TO THOSE WHO FOLLOW.
Very sadly did we leave it, but we gave our hearts in pledge
To the pine above the city, to the blossoms by the hedge,
To the cherry and the maple and the plum tree and the peach,
And the babies—Oh, the babies!—romping fatly under each.
Eastward ho! Across the water see the black bow drives and swings
From the land of Little Children, where the Babies are the Kings.