habits and prejudices, reform many defects of national character, and
undergo many stages of moral and mental discipline before they could
acclimatize themselves to the free atmosphere of representative
institutions. This preparation required a period of little over two
decades, and was effected not only through political discipline, but
by corresponding development in the moral, intellectual, social, and
industrial life of the nation.

I remarked in the beginning that the political activity of a nation is
not isolated from other spheres of its activities, but that there is a
mutual interchange of action and reaction among the different factors
of social life, so that to trace the political life of a nation it is
not only necessary to describe the organ through which it acts, the
governmental machinery, and the methods by which it is worked, but
to know "the forces which move it and direct its course." Now these
forces are political as well as non-political. This truth is now
generally acknowledged by constitutional writers. Thus, the English
author of "The American Commonwealth" devotes over one-third of his
second volume to the account of non-political institutions, and says
"there are certain non-political institutions, certain aspects of
society, certain intellectual or spiritual forces which count for
so much in the total life of the country, in the total impression it
makes and the hopes for the future which it raises, that they cannot
be left unnoticed."[1]

If this be the case in the study of the American commonwealth, it is
more so in that of Japanese politics. For nowhere else in the history
of nations do we see "non-political institutions" exerting such a
powerful influence upon the body politic as in New Japan. In this
chapter we shall therefore note briefly the growth of so-called