The missionaries were the pioneers of every good feature of civilization. In 1859, Hepburn opened the first dispensary in a land where there was no public hospital, or chimney, or newspaper, or milk-wagon, or stationary wash-stand, or any other than medieval devices of comfort. Public hygiene was scarcely known. The highways were full of sights of horror: a million outcasts, swarms of beggars, gamblers, lepers, smallpox patients moving freely abroad; eye-disorders, blindness, unmentionable diseases, and their victims; phallic shrines on the road, and phallic emblems freely exposed in the shops and at temple festivals; pilloried heads, gory execution-grounds, and blackened remains of judicial incineration. In the prisons, the apparatus of torture was elaborate and of infernal variety. Rotten humanity crowded the seats in Hepburn’s chapel, while about him were a dozen or so of the future physicians and surgeons now famous. To-day Japan has a thousand hospitals and a faculty of world-wide fame, while no nation excels her in public hygiene.
WILLIAM H. JAQUES, WHO INTRODUCED STEEL-MAKING PROCESSES INTO JAPANESE WAR-SHIPS
Long before the government hospitals or officially trained nurses were heard of, Dr. John Berry, a medical missionary, now of Worcester, Massachusetts, the father also of prison reform in Japan, had taught women nurses and begun the development of a noble army of white-robed ministering angels. Indeed, the first message of Christendom has been to womanhood, and gratefully have the Japanese made acknowledgment. As early as 1861, Mrs. James Curtis Hepburn opened at Yokohama a school for girls; she was followed by Miss Mary Kidder of Brooklyn. In 1871 was founded the Woman’s Union American Home, “on the Bluff,” in which hundreds of girls received the education that has made a multitude of homes in which the social equality of husband and wife is a reality. This home has now a hundred missionary duplicates. In 1872 Miss Margaret Clark Griffis began the first government school for girls, out of which have developed the Peeresses’ School and the Tokio Normal School, which have educated thousands of female teachers. It was an American woman missionary, Mrs. James Ballagh, who in 1863 first demonstrated, with two boys, the capacity of the Japanese voice to sing our scale. Since that time, besides Mr. Mason’s training of pupils in the public schools, pianos and brass bands have become common. Mr. Edward House, with a native orchestra in Tokio, gave an oratorio beautifully, and now in New York Mrs. Takaori is singing our airs.
A GROUP OF STUDENTS TAUGHT BY DR. GRIFFIS IN THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY OF TOKIO
How, in a brief article, can one recite what American women have done in education, from peasant hut to emperor’s palace, or tell of statesmen and diplomatists like E. Pershine Smith, John W. Foster, Henry Willard Denison, Durham White Stevens, John Hyde de Forest, the Rt. Rev. Merriman C. Harris; of Charles P. Bryan, who organized the national postal system; of men of finance, like George Burchell Williams; of art experts, like Ernest F. Fenollosa; of archæologists, like Edward S. Morse; of engineers, like William H. Jaques; of surgeons, like Duane B. Simmons and Albert Sydney Ashmead; of translators, like Daniel Crosby Greene or Nathan Brown, the latter by himself alone, after seven years’ study, making a superb version of the New Testament, and of a host of others of whose work it shames the writer not to speak? Lack of space forbids even mention in detail of the great missionary enterprise, with its university, colleges, schools, hospitals, dispensaries, and an army of high-souled and cultivated men and women. It has been possible to name scarcely any others than the pioneers. Yet without the direct influence of their foreign Christian teachers, and their practical training received in the sessions, debates, committee and public meetings of the church-congregations, the large measure of representative and self-government, already reached in constitutional Japan, would have been impossible. Only in this way can we explain the large proportion of active members of the Christian Church in the Imperial Diet and local assemblies.
MISS MARGARET GRIFFIS AND HER PUPILS
Miss Griffis was the first American woman teacher in the government school for Samurai girls in Japan