I realized that I was looking on that which was older than the saber-toothed tiger or the mausoleums of time, as old as the riddle of the Sphinx. I was gazing upon the oldest thing in the world--the spirit of progress. When the train reached the last station, Shinegawa, eight minutes from Shimbashi, which is to Tokyo what the Grand Central station is to New York, there were but two vacant seats left in the car, one beside the Marquis, one next myself. Two Japanese entered. The first was well dressed, foreign style, and, without looking, plumped into the seat near the Marquis. I was, apparently, the only one in the car who had recognized the great man. The second newcomer was one of those queer specimens of the hiatus from old to new which may be seen in the streets of the large cities. He wore the wooden Japanese geta and a half-caste kimono, but on his head was a dinky derby hat so low in the crown that the ticket he had stuck in the band was as tall as the hat. He halted in the door, abashed. Plainly he had taken the wrong coach. He should have gone third class. He was in a land where caste is everything and he felt out of his element. His limp attitude told his embarrassment and even his inscrutable face showed his pain. But the train had started and he could not get out. Marquis Ito touched the man on the arm and pointed out the seat at the farther end of the car. The poor fellow was only more embarrassed. He looked like a street tramp who might have stepped into a Fifth Avenue prayer meeting. At one shrewd glance the Marquis Ito saw the situation. He rose from his seat, offered it to the stranger with a simple gesture and himself walked the length of the car to the vacant place. * * * * * Know a nation’s great men and you know the nation, says the spirit of biography. Marquis Ito is to Japan what Count Tolstoi is to Russia, with this difference: Ito is in power, Tolstoi all but exiled. You may say that one is a statesman, the other a writer, and that hence they are not comparable. Yet, each stands before the world as the most significant intellectual figure among his people. There are other differences between the two. Ito is silent, Tolstoi has a clarion voice; Ito is omnipotent, Tolstoi powerless; Ito has no ostensible followers, Tolstoi counts his by the tens of thousands. Again you will say this is the difference not between men, but between statesman and prophet. Granted. But a curious fact lessens the force of that truth. Ito and Tolstoi are working for the same ends. Both seek the enfranchisement of men. The true difference between them is this: Ito sinks his personality in the cause he champions, satisfying Tolstoi’s own definition of the great man as being one too great to tell of his own goodness, while Tolstoi stalks his stalwart way to the limelight and focuses upon himself the attention of an age.