the [441] Japanese, not from the Occidental, point of view. But he performs his part well, does exactly what he has been told to do, and rarely anything more. His value to his Government is doubled or quadrupled by his allotted experience; but at home--except during a few years of expected duty as professor or lecturer--he will probably use that experience only as a psychological costume of ceremony,--a mental uniform to be donned when official occasion may require. It is otherwise in the case of men sent abroad for scientific studies requiring, not only intelligence and memory, but natural quickness of hand and eye,--surgery, medicine, military specialities. I doubt whether the average efficiency of Japanese surgeons can be surpassed. The study of war, I need hardly say, is one for which the national mind and character have inherited aptitude. But men sent abroad merely to win a foreign University-degree, and destined, after a term of educational duty, to higher official life, appear to set small value upon their foreign acquirements. However, even if they could win distinction in Europe by further effort at home, that effort would have to be made at a serious pecuniary sacrifice, and its results could not as yet be fairly appreciated by their own countrymen. Some of us have wondered at times what the old Egyptians or the old Greeks would have done if [442] suddenly brought into dangerous contact with a civilization like our own,--a civilization of applied mathematics, with sciences and branch-sciences of which the mere names would fill a dictionary. I think that the history of modern Japan suggests very clearly what any wise people, with a civilization based upon ancestor-worship, would have done. They would have speedily reconstructed their patriarchal society to meet the sudden peril; they would have adopted, with astonishing success, all the scientific machinery that they could use; they would have created a formidable army and a highly efficient navy; they would have sent their young aristocrats abroad to study alien convention, and to qualify for diplomatic duty; they would have established a new system of education, and obliged all their children to study many new things;--but toward the higher emotional and intellectual life of that alien civilization, they would naturally exhibit indifference: its best literature, its philosophy, its broader forms of tolerant religion could make no profound appeal to their moral and social experience. [443] INDUSTRIAL DANGER