is no necessity for any system of morals, as every Japanese acts aright if he only consults his own heart. The duty of a good Japanese consists in obeying the Mikado, without questioning whether his commands are right or wrong. The Mikado is god and vicar of all the gods, hence government and religion are the same, the Mikado being the centre of Church and State, which are one. Did the foreign nations know their duty they would at once hasten to pay tribute to the Son of Heaven in Kiōto. It is needless here to dwell upon the tremendous power of Shintō as a political system, especially when wedded with the forces, generated in the minds of the educated Japanese by modern Confucianism. The Chinese ethical system, expanded into a philosophy as fascinating as the English materialistic school of to-day, entered Japan contemporaneously with the revival of the Way of the Gods and of native learning. In full rampancy of their vigor, in the seventeenth century these two systems began that generation of national energy, which in the eighteenth century was consolidated and which in the nineteenth century, though unknown and unsuspected by Europeans or Americans, was all ready for phenomenal manifestation and tremendous eruption, even while Perry's fleet was bearing the olive branch to Japan. As we all know, this consolidation of forces from the inside, on meeting, not with collision but with union, the exterior forces of western civilization, formed a resultant in the energies which have made New Japan. The Great Purification of 1870.