with child to pray that it may be healthy and wise. It is possible for
us Japanese to worship some god somewhere without knowing why. The
poet says, 'I do not know the reason of it, but tears fall down from
my eyes in reverence and gratitude.' I suppose this is natural
theology. The proverb says, 'Even the head of a sardine is something
if believed in.' I attach more importance to a man's attitude to
something higher than himself than to the thing which is revered by
him. Whether a man goes to Nara and Kyoto or to a Roman Catholic or a
Methodist church he can come home very purified in heart."

"Some foreigners have thought well to call us 'half civilised,'" the
speaker went on. "Can it be that uncivilised is something distasteful
to or not understood by Europeans and Americans? We have the ambition
to erect some system of Eastern civilisation. It is possible that we
may have it in our minds to call some things in Europe 'half
civilised.' Surely the barbarians are usually the people other than
ourselves. When the townsman goes to the country he says the people
are savages. But the countryman finds his fellow-savages quite decent
people."

"Some time ago," broke in a professor, "I read a novel by René Bazin
and I could not but think how much alike were our peasants and the
peasants of the West."

The previous speaker resumed: "The other day a foreigner laughed in my
presence at our old art of incense burning and actually said that we
were deficient in the sense of smell. I told him that fifty years ago
our samurai class, in excusing their anti-foreign manifestations,
said they could not endure the smell of foreigners, and that to this
day our peasants may be heard to say of Western people, 'They smell;