"Literary, scientific, and religious papers--no. Quite free. All purely political papers pay five hundred yen--give to the Government to keep, or else some man says he will pay." "You must give security, you mean?" "I do not know, but sometimes the Government can keep the money. We are purely political." Then he asked questions about India, and appeared astonished to find that the natives there possessed considerable political power, and controlled districts. "But have you a Constitution in India?" "I am afraid that we have not." "Ah!" He crushed me there, and I left very humbly, but cheered by the promise that the _Tokio Public Opinion_ would contain an account of my words. Mercifully, that respectable journal is printed in Japanese, so the hash will not be served up to a large table. I would give a good deal to discover what meaning he attached to my forecast of Constitutional government in Japan. "We all talk politics now." That was the sentence which remained to me. It was true talk. Men of the Educational Department in Tokio told me that the students would "talk politics" by the hour if you allowed them. At present they were talking in the abstract about their new plaything, the Constitution, with its Upper House and its Lower House, its committees, its questions of supply, its rules of procedure, and all the other skittles we have played with for six hundred years. Japan is the second Oriental country which has made it impossible for a strong man to govern alone. This she has done of her own free will. India, on the other hand, has been forcibly ravished by the Secretary of State and the English M. P. Japan is luckier than India. No. XXI SHOWS THE SIMILARITY BETWEEN THE BABU AND THE JAPANESE. CONTAINS THE EARNEST OUTCRY OF AN UNBELIEVER. THE EXPLANATION OF MR. SMITH OF CALIFORNIA AND ELSEWHERE. TAKES ME ON BOARD SHIP AFTER DUE WARNING TO THOSE WHO FOLLOW. Very sadly did we leave it, but we gave our hearts in pledge To the pine above the city, to the blossoms by the hedge, To the cherry and the maple and the plum tree and the peach, And the babies--Oh, the babies!--romping fatly under each. Eastward ho! Across the water see the black bow drives and swings From the land of Little Children, where the Babies are the Kings. The Professor discovered me in meditation amid tea-girls at the back of the Ueno Park in the heart of Tokio. My 'rickshaw coolie sat by my side drinking tea from daintiest china, and eating maccaroons. I thought of Sterne's donkey and smiled vacuously into the blue above the trees. The tea-girls giggled. One of them captured my spectacles, perched them on her own snubby-chubby nose, and ran about among her cackling fellows. "And loose thy fingers in the tresses of The cypress-slender minister of wine," quoted the Professor, coming round a booth suddenly. "Why aren't you at the Mikado's garden party?"