The Crown Prince of Japan, Yoshihito--Prince of Haru-no-Miya--who will succeed the present Mikado on the throne, followed his father and mother in the adoption of Western ideas and customs. Though he has never traveled outside of Japan, he has ignored the traditions of his dynasty to an extent unheard of in any other Oriental country. His attendance at the Nobles School in Tokio marked the beginning of the new era in Japanese education. For theretofore the Imperial Princes were educated privately within the seclusion of the palace walls. The Crown Prince, however, recited his lessons with the children of the nobles and joined them in their games. In May, 1900, the Crown Prince, then in his twenty-first year, was married at Haru to the second daughter of Prince Kujo. His bride, Princess Sava-Ko, was then in her nineteenth year. As the future Empress of Japan, she is now receiving an education that will fit her for the throne. To conclude this mention of the Imperial family, it may be stated that the Shogun, meantime, and all that he represented, had passed into history. The last of the Tokugawa dynasty--referred to in a previous chapter--who abdicated in 1867, was, in 1901, living in retirement in Tokio as a private citizen, riding a bicycle and otherwise evincing practical approval of the New Japan that had shouldered aside the Old Japan. The new form of government in Japan was declared by statesmen of the Liberal party to be only semi-democratic. Enlightened Japanese and students of Japan’s development asserted that Japan was hampered rather than helped by this semi-democracy, and affirmed that the new order of things was a complete disappointment. “The representative assembly of Japan, so admirably arranged in theory,” wrote United States Senator Beveridge, after a close study of the subject, “has more than once proved to be a vexatious interference with the far-seeing plans of the empire’s real statesmen. The floors of the Diet have frequently been made rostrums from which demagogy has shouted to the masses--a stage upon which candidates for applause have outscreamed one another in playing the rôle of parliamentary conspicuity.”