The object-lesson in modern civilization, given by Perry on the sward at Yokohama, is now illustrated on a national scale. Under divine Providence, with unique opportunity, Japan began renascence at a time of the highest development of forces, spiritual mental, material. With Christianity, modern thought, electricity, steam, and the printing-press, the Mikado comes to his empire “at such a time as this.” Since the era of Meiji, or Enlightened Peace, was ushered in, January 26, 1858, the Mikado Mutsŭhito, the 123d sovereign of the imperial line, born twenty-one days before Perry sailed in the _Mississippi_ for Japan, has abolished the feudal system, emancipated four-fifths of his subjects from feudal vassalage and made them possessors of the soil, disarmed a feudal soldiery numbering probably six hundred thousand men trained to arms, reorganized the order of society, established and equipped an army forty thousand strong, and a navy superior in ships and equipments to that of the United States, assured the freedom of conscience, introduced the telegraph, railway, steam-navigation, general postal and saving, and free compulsory public educational systems;[65] declared the equality of all men before the law, promised limitation of the imperial prerogative, and the establishment of a national parliament in A. D. 1890. All this looks like a miracle. “Can a nation be born at once,” a land in one day? The story of the inward preparation of Nippon for its wondrous flowering in our day, of the development of national force, begun a century before Perry was born, which, with outward impact made not collision, but the unexpected resultant,—New Japan, deserves a volume from the historian, and an epic from the poet. We have touched upon the subject elsewhere.[66] Suffice it to say that the Dutch, so long maligned by writers of hostile faith and jealous nationality, to whom Perry in his book fails to do justice, bore an honorable and intelligent part in it.[67] Even Perry, Harris and the Americans constitute but one of many trains of influences contributing to the grand result. Perry himself died before that confluence of the streams of tendency, now so clearly visible, had been fully revealed to view. The prayers of Christians, the yearning of humanity, the pressure of commerce, the ambition of diplomacy, from the outside; the longing of patriots, the researches of scholars, the popularization of knowledge, the revival of the indigenous Shintō religion, the awakening of reverence for the Mikado’s person, the heated hatred almost to flame of the Yedo usurpation, the eagerness of students for western science, the fertilizing results of Dutch culture, from the inside; were all tributaries, which Providence made to rise, kept in check, and let loose to meet in flood at the elect moment.