When these rates of pay were fixed, about twenty years ago, house-rent was cheap: a good house could be rented anywhere at 3 Yen or 4 Yen per month. To-day in Tokyo an officer can scarcely rent even a very small house at less than 19 yen or 20 yen; and prices of food-stuffs have tripled. Yet there have been very few complaints. Officers whose pay will not allow them to rent houses hire rooms wherever they can. Many suffer hardship; but all are proud of the privilege of serving, and no one dreams of resigning.] To many it would seem that a wise government must recognize the impracticability of indefinitely maintaining its present demand for self-sacrifice, must perceive the necessity of encouraging talent, inviting fair competition, and making the prizes of life large enough to stimulate healthy egoism. But it is possible that the Government has been acting more wisely than outward appearances would indicate. Several years ago a Japanese official made in [415] my presence this curious observation: "Our Government does not wish to encourage competition beyond the necessary. The people are not prepared for it; and if it were strongly encouraged, the worst side of character would came to the surface." How far this statement really expressed any policy I do not know. But every one is aware that free competition can be made as cruel and as pitiless as war,--though we are apt to forget what experience must have been undergone before Occidental free competition could become as comparatively merciful, as it is. Among a people trained for centuries to regard all selfish competition as criminal, and all profit-seeking despicable, any sudden stimulation of effort for purely personal advantage might well be impolitic. Evidence as to how little the nation was prepared, twelve or thirteen years ago, for Western forms of free government, has been furnished by the history of the earlier district-elections and of the first parliamentary sessions. There was really no personal enmity in those furious election-contests, which cost so many lives; there was scarcely any personal antagonism in those parliamentary debates of which the violence astonished strangers. The political struggles were not really between individuals, but between clan-interests, or party-interests; and the devoted followers of each clan or party understood the new politics only as a new kind of war,--a war of loyalty to be fought for the leader's sake, [416]--a war not to be interfered with by any abstract notions of right or justice. Suppose that a people have been always accustomed to think of loyalty in relation to persons rather than to principles,--loyalty as involving the duty of self-sacrifice regardless of consequence,--it is obvious that the first experiments of such a people with parliamentary government will not reveal any comprehension of fair play in the Western sense. Eventually that comprehension may come; but it will not come quickly. And if you can