opinion that Japan is a faultless land, marred only by the presence of the foreign community.  And yet, let us consider.  It is the foreign community that has made it possible for the traveller to come and go from hotel to hotel, to get his passport for inland travel, to telegraph his safe arrival to anxious friends, and generally enjoy himself much more than he would have been able to do in his own country.  Government and gunboats may open a land, but it is the men of the Overseas Club that keep it open.  Their reward (not alone in Japan) is the bland patronage or the scarcely-veiled contempt of those who profit by their labours.  It is hopeless to explain to a traveller who has been ‘ohayoed’ into half-a-dozen shops and ‘sayonaraed’ out of half-a-dozen more and politely cheated in each one, that the Japanese is an Oriental, and, therefore, embarrassingly economical of the truth.  ’That’s his politeness,’ says the traveller.  ’He does not wish to hurt your feelings.  Love him and treat him like a brother, and he’ll change.’  To treat one of the most secretive of races on a brotherly basis is not very easy, and the natural politeness that enters into a signed and sealed contract and undulates out of it so soon as it does not sufficiently pay is more than embarrassing.  It is almost annoying.  The want of fixity or commercial honour may be due to some natural infirmity of the artistic temperament, or to the manner in which the climate has affected, and his ruler has ruled, the man himself for untold centuries.

Those who know the East know, where the system of ‘squeeze,’ which is commission, runs through every transaction of life, from the sale of a groom’s place upward, where the woman walks behind the man in the streets, and where the peasant gives you for the distance to the next town as many or as few miles as he thinks you will like, that these things must be so.  Those who do not know will not be persuaded till they have lived there.  The Overseas Club puts up its collective nose scornfully when it hears of the New and Regenerate Japan sprung to life since the ’seventies.  It grins, with shame be it written, at an Imperial Diet modelled on the German plan and a Code Napoleon a la Japonaise.  It is so far behind the New Era as to doubt that an Oriental country, ridden by etiquette of the sternest, and social distinctions almost as hard as those of caste, can be turned out to Western gauge in the compass of a very young man’s fife.  And it must be prejudiced, because it is daily and hourly in contact with the Japanese, except when it can do business with the Chinaman whom it prefers.  Was there ever so disgraceful a club!