We must agree with our author, that institutions, however anomalous they may appear to us, must have some merit which can so satisfactorily secure “the material prosperity of a population estimated at thirty millions, which has made an Eden of this volcanic soil, and has grown in numbers and wealth by unaided native industry, shut out from all intercourse with the rest of the world.” So that Sir Rutherford, after all, gives quite as favourable a picture of Japan as any of the “hasty visitors,” the accuracy of whose first impressions he thus impugns:— “Those writers,” he exclaims, “who, on the strength of a superficial observation, or a flying visit to Nagasaki, have led the credulous public in Europe and America to believe that the triumph of European civilisation in Japan is already secure, and that the Japanese Government is promoting it, must have been strangely deluded! As to progress and advance in the path of civilisation, the papers laid before Parliament at this period, in which I passed in review the progress made in the previous six months—the first after the opening of the ports under treaties in July last—must have given a very different impression.” But this is a gloomy view of affairs not usual with our author; for a few pages later, remarking on the effect which foreign trade is likely to produce, he observes:— “How soon such changes may come it is impossible to say, seeing what marvellous progress has marked the last seven years. Notwithstanding their long and resolutely-maintained isolation and exclusivism, carried even into their political economy, and cherished in the national mind as their ark of safety and the shibboleth of their independence, the day has arrived when a British Minister can take up his residence in the capital, and is received by the Tycoon, not as were the chiefs of the Dutch factory at Decima—long the only representatives of Europe—in days now long passed, and never, it is to be hoped, to return.” In another place— “They are a well-to-do, flourishing, and advancing people, and for generations and centuries have maintained a respectable level of intellectual cultivation and social virtues.” Sir Rutherford, in his desponding mood, cites, as an instance of the obstructive and unprogressive policy of the Government, that they refused to accept an offer made by Europeans to run monthly a steamer for them between their own ports; but he writes more sanguinely when he gives us an account of a visit he paid to the Government steam-factory at Nagasaki:— “I could not but admire the progress made under every possible difficulty, by the Japanese and Dutch combined, in their endeavours to create in this remote corner of the earth all the complicated means and appliances for the repair and manufacture ultimately of steam machinery.”