In the year 1861 Mr Fukusawa voyaged to Europe on a British man-of-war, being entrusted at that time with a government mission to make literary researches, and he travelled through England, Holland, Prussia, Russia, and Portugal. On his return to Japan in the ensuing year he translated and published many of the English and other books which he had brought back with him, thereby adding immeasurably to the store of information then possessed by his countrymen on the subject of foreign lands and peoples. After occupying himself in this useful work more or less until 1867 he was despatched in that, the third year of the Kei-o era, to the United States, taking his passage this time in an American mail-boat for San Francisco. His object accomplished, he returned to Yedo just at the beginning of the Meiji period, and established in 1868 the College with which his name will for ever be associated. The Kei-o Gi-juku school was first set up in the temple of Shinsenza, in the Shiba quarter of the capital, but in the fourth of Meiji (1871), it was transferred to more spacious and convenient premises at Mita, still in the Shiba district, the curriculum including law, mathematics, and political economy. Not less than 14,000 students claim to have passed through this college, and at the present time fully 2500 are entered on its books. It is impossible to convey an adequate idea in so many words of the extent of Mr Fukusawa’s influence and the share which he had in building up the fabric of modern Japan, for at one time and another by far the major portion of her leading men derived their education either by direct training at his school or by the perusal and study of the English works which he translated. He was an ardent advocate of the early opening of the Diet, and was a resolute opponent of those ancient customs that tended to hinder Japan’s progress, strongly insisting, for one thing, on monogamy and the equality of rights of the sexes, having accomplished much in his lifetime towards raising the status of womanhood throughout the Japanese dominions. He vigorously opposed Confucianism in his “General laws of the doctrines of Morality,” a work which had for its primary object the enforcement of the principle of the independence and justification of the right of prudent self-government of man.