Comprehending the situation in its fulness, no man can deny that the race is actually started on the road to better things than their past might have indicated that they were capable of attaining.
A Japanese Populist
BY THOMAS C. HUTTEN
Author of “National Characteristics,” “The Farthest East”
TWO years ago a prominent Russian patriot admitted a misgiving that nothing but a miracle could shake the strongholds of Czarish despotism. It does not impeach the correctness of his view that the miracle has been accomplished.
A giant has entered the political arena; a new world power has risen from the dust of a Buddhist serf-kennel, and it is about time to recognize the fact that the marvel of evolution has been effected by progress in the direction of popular democracy.
The memorable vote of the daimios was a renunciation of class privileges. Of the forty amendments in the new constitution of the Japanese Empire, twenty-six tend to reform the abuses of class legislation. The nation controls two-thirds of its mines. Stockholders of a telegraph monopoly have been forced to accept a time limit of their contract. Six hundred and twenty miles of railroads are managed—and successfully managed—by a national board of administration. The Government, in the name of the nation, builds its own warships and welds its own armor-plates, instead of farming out jobs to the highest briber. The Ways and Means Committee of 1901 reduced direct taxation almost on the exact plan of the system recommended by the reformer Bakunin—reserving building lots in new cities and granting tenures from two to ten years at gradually increasing rates of rent.
Populist reforms have rendered the Government popular enough to make the nation invincible.
And the world-wide need of those reforms has been repeatedly urged by Japanese travelers, and with the emphasis of strong personal conviction, especially by a keen observer who visited Europe and North America in the summer of 1903.