Tokyo will remain what it has always been, the home of the best classes in every department of national life. It will always indicate the high-water mark of oriental culture and occidental influence. Here, as nowhere else, will be seen that antagonism of the two, the pressure of western customs and ways of life following on the heels of the sciences and practical knowledge we are eagerly imbibing from the West and the resistance of oriental traditions and usages, which refuse to admit a tittle more than is absolutely necessary to bring the country to a material and intellectual equality with the foremost nations of the world. To those who look below the surface nothing is more interesting in viewing the progress of Japan than this combination of radicalism and conservatism. The Japanese, for all his apparent love of innovation, still retains that stolid self-satisfaction usually associated with the oriental mind, though it is no rarer in the West. He has long recognised that his country must advance along the lines taken at the Restoration, but he would have the development take place without the sacrifice of the national characteristics which have marked his countrymen from time immemorial. The agitation which was set up some twenty years ago for the preservation of these characteristics by those who feared the mania for everything European which was then at its height would result in the obliteration of the qualities which have kept Japan in full vitality through the centuries, still finds an echo in his heart. The threatened sudden metamorphosis of those days was but a passing whim; the change is now slower and more subtle, and it is hard to mark the exact line at which the encroaching tide of European civilisation shall be made to stop. But the Japanese feels that the line must be drawn somewhere. The problem is certainly difficult to solve. It appears hardly possible to reap the fruits of the material and intellectual progress of the West and yet to shut out the moral and religious sources of that progress; but for all that, it would be premature to pronounce it impossible. For we have already done what seemed at first beyond the verge of possibility. Who, for instance, of the thousands who nightly thronged to the Savoy Theatre to laugh over the famous Gilbert and Sullivan opera, would have thought at the time that a few years thence their country would form a treaty of alliance with the land of Koko, Yum-yum, and Nankipoo? They would have flouted the very idea; but that alliance is generally regarded as a natural outcome of the recent course of events in the Ear East. Would it be, we wonder, a much harder task to discriminate the elements of European civilisation?