From Sea to Sea Part 24

This was a quotation from a speech delivered at Otsu, a few days previously, by a member of the Government. I grinned at the brotherhood of editors all the world over. Up went the hand anew.

"We shall be happy with this Const.i.tution and a people civilised among civilisations."

"Of course. But what will you actually do with it? A Const.i.tution is rather a monotonous thing to work after the fun of sending members to Parliament has died out. You have a Parliament, have you not?"

"Oh yes, _with_ parties--Liberal and Radical."

"Then they will both tell lies to you and to each other. Then they will pa.s.s bills, and spend their time fighting each other. Then all the foreign governments will discover that you have no fixed policy."

"Ah, yes. But the Const.i.tution." The little hands were crossed in his lap. The cigarette hung limply from his mouth.

"No fixed policy. Then, when you have sufficiently disgusted the foreign Powers, they will wait until the Liberals and Radicals are fighting very hard, and then they will blow you out of the water."

"You are not making fun? I do not quite understand," said he. "Your Const.i.tutions are all so b.l.o.o.d.y."

"Yes. That is exactly what they are. You are very much in earnest about yours, are you not?"

"Oh yes, we all talk politics now."

"And write politics, of course. By the way, under what--h'm, arrangements with the Government is a j.a.panese paper published? I mean, must you pay anything before starting a press?"

"Literary, scientific, and religious papers--no. Quite free. All purely political papers pay five hundred yen--give to the Government to keep, or else some man says he will pay."

"You must give security, you mean?"

"I do not know, but sometimes the Government can keep the money. We are purely political."

Then he asked questions about India, and appeared astonished to find that the natives there possessed considerable political power, and controlled districts.

"But have you a Const.i.tution in India?"

"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 j.a.panese, 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 Const.i.tutional government in j.a.pan.

"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 Const.i.tution, 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.

j.a.pan 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.

j.a.pan is luckier than India.

No. XXI

SHOWS THE SIMILARITY BETWEEN THE BABU AND THE j.a.pANESE. CONTAINS THE EARNEST OUTCRY OF AN UNBELIEVER. THE EXPLANATION OF MR. SMITH OF CALIFORNIA AND ELSEWHERE. TAKES ME ON BOARD s.h.i.+P 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.

The Professor discovered me in meditation amid tea-girls at the back of the Ueno Park in the heart of Tokio. My 'rickshaw coolie sat by my side drinking tea from daintiest china, and eating maccaroons. I thought of Sterne's donkey and smiled vacuously into the blue above the trees. The tea-girls giggled. One of them captured my spectacles, perched them on her own snubby-chubby nose, and ran about among her cackling fellows.

"And loose thy fingers in the tresses of The cypress-slender minister of wine," quoted the Professor, coming round a booth suddenly. "Why aren't you at the Mikado's garden party?"

"Because he didn't invite me, and, anyhow, he wears Europe clothes--so does the Empress--so do all the Court people. Let's sit down and consider things. This people puzzles me."

And I told my story of the interview with the Editor of the _Tokio Public Opinion_. The Professor had been making investigation into the Educational Department. "And further," said he at the end of the tale, "the ambition of the educated student is to get a place under Government. Therefore he comes to Tokio: will accept any situation at Tokio that he may be near to his chance."

"Whose son is that student?"

"Son of the peasant, yeoman farmer, and shopkeeper, _ryot_, _tehsildar_, and _bunnia_. While he waits he imbibes Republican leanings on account of the nearness of j.a.pan to America. He talks and writes and debates, and is convinced he can manage the Empire better than the Mikado."

"Does he go away and start newspapers to prove that?"

"He may; but it seems to be unwholesome work. A paper can be suspended without reason given under the present laws; and I'm told that one enterprising editor has just got three years' simple imprisonment for caricaturing the Mikado."

"Then there is yet hope for j.a.pan. I can't quite understand how a people with a taste for fighting and quick artistic perceptions can care for the things that delight our friends in Bengal."

"You make the mistake of looking on the Bengali as unique. So he is in his own peculiar style; but I take it that the drunkenness of Western wine affects all Oriental folk in much the same way. What misleads you is that very likeness. Followest thou? Because a j.a.p struggles with problems beyond his grip in much the same phraseology as a Calcutta University student, and discusses Administration with a capital A, you lump j.a.p and Chatterjee together."

"No, I don't. Chatterjee doesn't sink his money in railway companies, or sit down and provide for the proper sanitation of his own city, or of his own notion cultivate the graces of life, as the j.a.p does. He is like the _Tokio Public Opinion_--'purely political.' He has no art whatever, he has no weapons, and there is no power of manual labour in him. Yet he is like the j.a.p in the pathos of his politics. Have you ever studied Pathetic Politics? _Why_ is he like the j.a.p?"

"Both drunk, I suppose," said the Professor. "Get that girl to give back your gig-lamps, and you will be able to see more clearly into the soul of the Far East."

"The 'Far East' hasn't got a soul. She swapped it for a Const.i.tution on the Eleventh of February last. Can any Const.i.tution make up for the wearing of Europe clothes? I saw a j.a.p lady just now in full afternoon calling-kit. She looked atrocious. Have you seen the later j.a.panese art--the pictures on the fans and in the shop windows? They are faithful reproductions of the changed life--telegraph poles down the streets, conventionalised tram-lines, top-hats, and carpet-bags in the hands of the men. The artists can make those things almost pa.s.sable, but when it comes to conventionalising a Europe dress, the effect is horrible."

"j.a.pan wishes to take her place among civilised nations," said the Professor.

"That's where the pathos comes in. It's enough to make you weep to watch this misdirected effort--this wallowing in unloveliness for the sake of recognition at the hands of men who paint their ceilings white, their grates black, their mantelpieces French grey, and their carriages yellow and red. The Mikado wears blue and gold and red, his guards wear orange breeches with a stone-blue stripe down them; the American missionary teaches the j.a.panese girl to wear bangs--"s.h.i.+ngled bangs"--on her forehead, plait her hair into a pigtail, and to tie it up with magenta and cobalt ribbons. The German sells them the offensive chromos of his own country and the labels of his beer-bottles. Allen and Ginter devastate Tokio with their blood-red and gra.s.s-green tobacco-tins. And in the face of all these things the country wishes to progress toward civilisation! I have read the entire Const.i.tution of j.a.pan, and it is dearly bought at the price of one of the kaleidoscope omnibuses plying in the street there."

"Are you going to inflict all that nonsense on them at home?" said the Professor.

"I am. For this reason. In the years to come, when j.a.pan has sold her birthright for the privilege of being cheated on equal terms by her neighbours; when she has so heavily run into debt for her railways and public works that the financial a.s.sistance of England and annexation is her only help; when the Daimios through poverty have sold the treasures of their houses to the curio-dealer, and the dealer has sold them to the English collector; when all the people wear slop-trousers and ready-made petticoats, and the Americans have established soap factories on the rivers and a boarding-house on the top of Fujiyama, some one will turn up the files of the _Pioneer_ and say: 'This thing was prophesied.' Then they will be sorry that they began tampering with the great sausage-machine of civilisation. What is put into the receiver must come out at the spout; but it must come out mincemeat. _Dixi!_ And now let us go to the tomb of the Forty-Seven Ronins."

"It has been said some time ago, and much better than you can say it,"

said the Professor, _apropos_ of nothing that I could see.

Distances are calculated by the hour in Tokio. Forty minutes in a 'rickshaw, running at full speed, will take you a little way into the city; two hours from the Ueno Park brings you to the tomb of the famous Forty-Seven, pa.s.sing on the way the very splendid temples of s.h.i.+ba, which are all fully described in the guide-books. Lacquer, gold-inlaid bronze-work, and crystals carved with the words "Om" and "Shri" are fine things to behold, but they do not admit of very varied treatment in print. In one tomb of one of the temples was a room of lacquer panels overlaid with gold leaf. An animal of the name of V. Gay had seen fit to scratch his entirely uninteresting name on the gold. Posterity will take note that V. Gay never cut his fingernails, and ought not to have been trusted with anything prettier than a hog-trough.

"It is the handwriting upon the wall," I said.