I quote the following of many press despatches which constantly appear in the Japanese and world press: “To give his life as an atonement because the emperor of Japan had to spend an hour in a common waiting-room, Moji Shijiro Shimidzu, a trainmaster, threw himself under a train. Shimidzu had been in charge of arrangements for a journey the emperor made from Kyushu, after witnessing the army maneuvers. The imperial train was delayed by a derailment at a misplaced switch. Shimidzu left a letter saying that he considered it his duty to pay for the emperor’s embarrassment with his life.” The spectacular suicide of the immortal captor of Port Arthur, General Nogi, and his wife at the time of the funeral of the Mikado Mutsuhito on September 13, 1912, comes under the same category of godless savagery forbidden mankind by the Sixth Commandment of Sinai. It is time for Japan to cease posing through her press bureau. We all admire her for many sane and grand things done, and to tell the truth, we admire the Japanese people more than their present system of a privileged government where only five millions out of sixty millions enjoy the franchise. It is a government of the people, but not sufficiently a government for the people, and certainly not a government by all the people, all of which conditions Lincoln said should obtain if liberty was to be assured. That is the aim of the whole world, and it has been accomplished now in England, America, France, China, Portugal and Switzerland. The Shimidzus, who commit suicide, do not exhibit patriotism but hysterical conceit, and the thoroughly organized Japanese press bureau, and the Choshiu, Satsuma, and other privileged clans, in their own best interests, should discourage the nonsense; and instead of elevating the man as a god in the Shinto shrine, they should exhibit him in the foyer of fools. Christianity teaches that there is only one being for whom we should give our lives, and that anything else is idolatry. It is not the emperor or the president whom we are to serve, but the emperor’s men and women; the president’s men and women; that is, the state, and a real emperor and a real president must, too, serve the state, which is all the people. Such is the modern logic Japan should teach her people, and not the hysteria of Bushido. Japan is not ignorant of her disabilities, and each of the Seiyukei, Kokuminto and Yushinkai parties are endeavoring to extend the educational system which Guido Verbeck fashioned for the favored Satsuma, Choshiu, Fujiwara, Gen, Tosa, Hizen, Kago and other clans of five millions, to the forty-eight millions of agriculturalists, miners, factorymen and fishermen, and twelve million Koreans and Formosans. Success to Japan’s educational extension, is America’s and Britain’s hearty wish, for it “will calm a sea of troubles”.