change would be inevitable because of the changes in the
assemblies. Directors and teachers keep circling from post to
post; there are men little more than thirty years old who have
taught in almost every province of the country. That any
educational system could have produced any great results under
these conditions seems nothing short of miraculous.

We are accustomed to think that some degree of stability is
necessary to all real progress, all great development. But Japan
has given proof irrefutable that enormous development is possible
without any stability at all. The explanation is in the race
character,--a race character in more ways than one the very
opposite of our own. Uniformly mobile, and thus uniformly
impressionable, the nation has moved unitedly in the direction of
great ends, submitting the whole volume of its forty millions to
be moulded by the ideas of its rulers, even as sand or as water
is shaped by wind. And this submissiveness to reshaping belongs
to the old conditions of its soul life,--old conditions of rare
unselfishness and perfect faith. The relative absence from the
national character of egotistical individualism has been the
saving of an empire; has enabled a great people to preserve its
independence against prodigious odds. Wherefore Japan may well be
grateful to her two great religions, the creators and the
preservers of her moral power to Shinto, which taught the
individual to think of his Emperor and of his country before
thinking either of his own family or of himself; and to Buddhism,
which trained him to master regret, to endure pain, and to accept
as eternal law the vanishing of things loved and the tyranny of
things hated.