Economy and Finances of Japan), by Karl Rathgen, has served him as guide and furnished him with some of his statistical matter, while recent English Blue-books provided valuable material for his account of the latest diplomatic negotiations.

an

Defective and unsatisfying as such attempt to sketch the history of reform in Japan must necessarily be, the writer nevertheless thought it incumbent on him not to shirk the task, seeing that, having lived so long in the Far East as an eye-witness of the events recorded, and as an occasional assistant of their authors, he felt particularly called upon to contribute to an appreciation of the magnificent achievements of the statesmen and diplomatists of the Meiji Era who have laid the foundation-stone of Japan's enlightenment and international equality.

CHÂTEAU LEIPHEIM

(On the Danube)

December 1899.

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

THE recent course of events in the Far East has once more attracted the attention of the West to that remarkable Power which, as it brought China to her knees in 1894, has again been foremost in the ranks of the nations that allied themselves for the purpose of calling the Celestial Empire to account for the outrages perpetrated by its Government and people on what may be called the rights of civilisation. In the advance on Pekin to rescue the Legations of the Powers from a fate worse than that of another Cawnpore, the troops of Japan formed the strongest and most efficient contingent of the Allied Army; and, indeed, it may be said that, but for the general assistance rendered by the Imperial Government at Tokio throughout the whole crisis, the

cause of the West would not have been so quickly or so completely vindicated.

This was altogether a new phenomenon in the history of the world-this championing of the cause of civilisation by a Far Eastern Power like Japan, which, until a year or two ago, had not been thought worthy of the rights and privileges enjoyed by the nations of Europe in their intercourse with one another. What was the explanation of this change, this very sudden change? What is the secret of the fact that, for the last seven years at least, the attention of Englishmen in particular has been riveted on Japan much in the same way as it was concentrated on Germany after it had been regenerated by a policy of blood and ironriveted on Japan, I say, as on a country which had suddenly assumed the form of a new and dominant force in the political arena of the Far East?

The explanation of all this is very simple. What Germany had become in Europe

In the year 1868

through a policy of blood and iron, Japan had attained to in the Far East by adopting the civilisation of the West, as one would exchange a medieval mantle for a modern coat. While China still obstinately and suicidally clung to her Confucianism, with all that this imports, Japan made haste to assimilate the ideas of the Occident, with the result, among other things, that the Celestial Empire went down before her touch like crumbled clay. Japan was still pretty much the Japan of old; but by 1900 she had sprung into line, almost as if at a single bound, with the most highly civilised nations of the world. The former was the year of her so-called Restoration, when the Shogunate, or Majordomo despotism of the land, had been replaced by the old Imperial power; and within about thirty years of that time Japan had been fully admitted into the fellowship of European nations as a civilised and a constitutional State-hundreds of years ahead of China.

Nothing so rapid or complete in the shape of national transformation is recorded in the history of the world, and therefore this little work of my friend, Baron Alexander von Siebold, must have a very special interest for English readers. The Baron has the double qualification of family inheritance and personal experience for the interesting and instructive story which he tells us. A son of the celebrated German scientist and Eastern pioneer, Philip Francis von Siebold—who may be said to have been mainly instrumental in rendering Japan accessible to the ideas of the West, as witness his elaborate work, Nippon," on the subject-Baron Alexander, when only in his thirteenth year, accompanied his father to that country, of which he was quick to master the language.

In 1861 he was appointed supernumerary Japanese interpreter to the British Legation at Yedo, where he served his diplomatic apprenticeship under men like Sir Rutherford Alcock and Sir Harry Parkes, sharing in all