delight, because so rapid. The Renaissance was such a period in
Europe. Modern art, science, and philosophy took their start with the
awakening of the mind of Europe at that eventful and epochal period of
her life. Such, I take it, is the condition of Japan to-day. She is
"being born again"; undergoing her "renaissance." Her intellect,
hitherto largely dormant, is but now awaking. Her ambition is equaled
only by her self-reliance. Her self-confidence and amazing
expectations have not yet been sobered by hard experience. Neither
does she, nor do her critics, know how much she can or cannot do. She
is in the first flush of her new-found powers; powers of mind and
spirit, as well as of physical force. Her dreams are gorgeous with all
the colors of the rainbow. Her efforts are sure, to be noble in
proportion as her ambitions are high. The growth of the past
half-century is only the beginning of what we may expect to see.

Then again, this latest and greatest step in the evolution of Japan
has taken place at a time unparalleled for opportunities of
observation, under the incandescent light of the nineteenth century,
with its thousands of educated men to observe and record the facts,
many of whom are active agents in the evolution in progress. Hundreds
of papers and magazines, native and European, read by tens of
thousands of intelligent men and women, have kept the world aware of
the daily and hourly events. Telegraphic dispatches and letters by the
million have passed between the far East and the West. It would seem
as if the modernizing of Japan had been providentially delayed until
the last half of the nineteenth century with its steam and
electricity, annihilators of space and time, in order that her
evolution might be studied with a minuteness impossible in any
previous age, or by any previous generation. It is almost as if one
were conducting an experiment in human evolution in his own