What is their health of mind and body? By what social and moral
principles and prejudices are they swayed? To what extent are they
adequate to the demand that is made and is likely to be made upon
them? In what respects are they the masters of their lives or are
mastered? In what ways are they still open to Western influences? And
in what directions are they now inclined to trust to "themselves
alone"?

If the masters of the rural journal were sometimes mistaken in the
observations they made from horseback, I cannot have escaped
blundering in passing through more dimly lit scenes than they visited.
"If there appears here and there any uncorrectness, I do not hold
myself obliged to answer for what I could not perfectly govern."[8]
But I have laboriously taken all the precautions I could and I have
obeyed as far as possible a recent request that "visitors to the Far
East should confine themselves to what they have seen with their own
eyes." As Huxley wrote, "all that I have proposed to myself is to say,
This and this have I learned."

I take pleasure in recalling that some years ago I was approached with
a view to undertaking for the United States Government a
socio-agricultural investigation in a foreign country. Reared as I
have been in the whole faith of a citizen of the English-speaking
world, I am glad to think that the present volume may be of some
service to American readers. The United States is within ten
days--Canada is within nine--of Japan against Great Britain's month by
the Atlantic-C.P.R.-Pacific route and eight weeks by Suez. There are
more American visitors than British to Japan. It was America that
first opened Japan to the West, and the debt of Japan to American
training and stimulus is immense. But British services to Japan have