It is a picturesque situation--one that suggests romances and
extravaganzas. Thus, imagine a dreaming Court intrenched behind a triple
line of moats where the lotus blooms in summer--a Court whose outer
fringe is aggressively European, but whose heart is Japan of long ago,
where a dreaming King sits among some wives or other things, amused from
time to time with magic-lantern shows and performing fleas--a holy King
whose sanctity is used to conjure with, and who twice a year gives
garden-parties where every one must come in top-hat and frock coat.
Round this Court, wavering between the splendours of the sleeping and
the variety shows of the Crystal Palace, place in furious but
carefully-veiled antagonism the fragments of newly shattered castes,
their natural Oriental eccentricities overlaid with borrowed Western
notions. Imagine now, a large and hungry bureaucracy, French in its
fretful insistence on detail where detail is of no earthly moment,
Oriental in its stress on etiquette and punctillo, recruited from a
military caste accustomed for ages past to despise alike farmer and
trader. This caste, we will suppose, is more or less imperfectly
controlled by a syndicate of three clans, which supply their own
nominees to the Ministry. These are adroit, versatile, and unscrupulous
men, hampered by no western prejudice in favour of carrying any plan to
completion. Through and at the bidding of these men, the holy Monarch
acts; and the acts are wonderful. To criticise these acts exists a
wild-cat Press, liable to suppression at any moment, as morbidly
sensitive to outside criticism as the American, and almost as childishly
untruthful, fungoid in the swiftness of its growth, and pitiable in its
unseasoned rashness. Backers of this press in its wilder moments,
lawless, ignorant, sensitive and vain, are the student class, educated
in the main at Government expense, and a thorn in the side of the State.
Judges without training handle laws without precedents, and new measures
are passed and abandoned with almost inconceivable levity. Out of the