The radical difference between the two countries in this respect we take to be this: that while Japan loves change for the sake of change, China dislikes it, and will only adopt it when it is clearly demonstrated to her that change is absolutely necessary. To the Japanese change appears to be a delightful excitement, to the Chinese a distasteful necessity; to the former whatever is must be wrong, to the latter whatever is is right. As a consequence of this difference between the two peoples, when China once makes a step forward it is generally after much deliberation, and is never retraced. Japan is constantly undertaking new schemes with little care or thought for the morrow, but with the applause of injudicious foreign friends. In a short time she discovers that she has underrated the expense or exaggerated the results, and her projects are straightway abandoned as rapidly and thoughtlessly as they were commenced. Swift suggested as a suitable subject for a philosophical writer a history of human projects which were never carried out; the historian of modern Japan finds these at every turn. Where, for example, are the results of the great surveys, trigonometrical and others, which were commenced in Yezo and the main island about ten years ago? A large, expensive, but highly competent foreign staff was engaged, and worked for a few years; but suddenly the whole survey department was swept away, and the valuable instruments are, or were recently, lying rusting in a warehouse in Tokio. The same story may be told of scores of other scientific or educational undertakings in Japan. An able and careful writer, Col. H.S. Palmer, R.E., who has recently, with a friendly and sympathetic eye, examined the whole field of recent Japanese progress, in the _British_ _Quarterly Review_ is forced to acknowledge this. "Once having recognized," says this officer, "that progress is essential to welfare, and having resolved, first among the nations of the East, to throw off past traditions and mould their civilization after that of Western countries, it was not in the nature of the lively and impulsive Japanese to advance along the path of reform with the calmness and circumspection that might have been possible to a people of less active temperament. Without doubt many foreign institutions were at first adopted rather too hastily, and the passing difficulties which now beset Japan are to some extent the inevitable result." It would be blindness to deny that the net result of the Japanese efforts is progress of a very remarkable kind, but it is a progress which in many respects lacks the firm and abiding characteristics of Chinese movements.