Consider the bewildering rapidity of recent changes,--from the reconstruction of society in 1871 to the opening of the first national parliament in 1891. Down to the middle of the nineteenth century the nation had remained in the condition common to European patriarchal communities twenty-six hundred years ago: society had indeed entered upon a second period of integration, but had traversed only one great revolution. And then the country was suddenly hurried through two more social revolutions of the most extraordinary kind,--signalized by the abolition of the daimiates, the suppression of the military class, the substitution of a plebeian for an aristocratic army, popular enfranchisement, the rapid formalism of a new commonalty. industrial [446] expansion, the rise of a new aristocracy of wealth, and popular representation in government! Old Japan had never developed a wealthy and powerful middle class: she had not even approached that stage of industrial development which, in the ancient European societies, naturally brought about the first political struggles between rich and poor. Her social organization made industrial oppression impossible: the commercial classes were kept at the bottom of society,--under the feet even of those who, in more highly evolved communities, are most at the mercy of money-power. But now those commercial classes, set free and highly privileged, are silently and swiftly ousting the aristocratic ruling-class from power,--are becoming supremely important. And under the new order of things, forms of social misery, never before known in the history of the race, are being developed. Some idea of this misery may be obtained from the fact that the number of poor people in Tokyo unable to pay their annual resident-tax is upwards of 50,000; yet the amount of the tax is only about 20 sen, or 5 pence English money. Prior to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a minority there was never any such want in any part of Japan,--except, of course, as a temporary consequence of war.