ed, among them Katsuki Kéguro, a student educated in Albany and London. It was the old story of sectionalism against national interests. It was miniature secession. Scores of officials and men, but very few students, bound by oath and duty to the National Government, which had nourished or educated them, assembled with arms and traitorous intent in Hizen, and raised the cry of "On to Corea !"

Here was armed rebellion. Were the flames to spread, all Kiushiu would be involved. In the midst of the impending civil war, the foreign ministers pressed the payment of the last installment of the Shimonoséki indemnity, expecting that Japan could not or would not pay it, but would grant more one-sided concessions. In pride and anger, the Japanese passed over the money-bags, and closed the contemptible business forever.

The political barometer now began rapidly to fall. The Hizen war-cloud gathered blackness. The storm broke in war-fires and battle-blood. The rebels attacked the castle, and killed the garrison. Elated, they waited to see all Kiushiu join them. Their reckoning was fifty years behind the age. The days of Old Japan were passed. The era of steam, electricity, and breech-loaders had come. From the national capital darted the telegraphic lightnings. On the wings of steam, the imperial battalions swooped on Saga, as if by magic. The rebellion was annihilated in ten days. The leader, master-spirit, and judge was Okubo, modest in demeanor, wise in council, but in the field. the lion-hearted hero that knows no fear. Eto, Katsuki, and ten other ringleaders were sent to kneel before the blood-pit. The sword fell as each chanted his death-song. The heads of Eto and Shima were exposed on the pillory. The National Government was vindicated, and sectionalism crushed, perhaps, forever.*

The story of the Formosan affair is more familiar to my readers. Thirteen hundred Japanese soldiers occupied this island for six months. In the few skirmishes with the savages, breech-loaders prevailed over arrows and smooth-bores. The imperial troops were commanded by Saigo Yorimichi, brother of Saigō Kichinosuké. They built roads,

* In this campaign, over 40 villages and 1600 houses in Saga were burned, and 350 of the national troops and 400 of the insurgents were put hors de combat. About 500 persons thus lost their lives by war's accidents, and 195 were punished with hard labor, imprisonment, or degradation from the rank of samurai. Eto was discovered in disguise, by means of a photograph for which he had sat, to begin a "rogue's gallery," when Minister of Justice, in Tokio. Ōkubo proved himself a Jackson, not a Buchanan, and made Saga both the Sumter and the Petersburg of the Hizen secession.

and kept camps, and made fortifications in the style of modern engineering and military art. The attitude of China at first had been that of the sleeping crocodile that allows the tiny bird to enter its mouth to pick its teeth for food. Incited, however, by foreign influence in Peking, the sleepy nation woke in wrath and shame at the rebuke of Japan. The Chinese Government began to urge their claims on Formosa, to declare the Japanese intruders, and to menace hostilities. For a time, war seemed inevitable. Again the man for the crisis was Ōkubo, who went to Peking. The result of this was that the Chinese paid, in solid silver, an indemnity of seven hundred thousand dollars, and the Japanese disembarked. To outsiders in Europe, the whole affair seemed but a "tempest in two tea-pots;" but, morally, it was sublime. Japan, single-handed, with no foreign sympathy, but with positive opposition, had, in the interests of humanity, rescued a coast from terror, and placed it in a condition of safety. In the face of threatened war, a nation having but one-tenth the population, area, and resources of China, had abated not a jot of its just demands, nor flinched from the wager of the battle. The righteousness of her cause was vindicated. China now occupies Eastern Formosa. The expedition cost Japan five millions of dollars. Seven hundred victims of disease in peaceful graves sleep under the camphor-trees on the templed slopes of the Nagasaki hills.

The Corean affair ended happily. In 1875, Mr. Arinori Mori went to Peking. Kuroda Kiyotaka, with men-of-war, entered Corean waters. Patience, skill, and tact were crowned with success. On behalf of Japan, a treaty of peace, friendship, and commerce was made between the two countries, February 27th, 1876. Japan has thus peacefully opened this last of the hermit nations to the world.

Japan was among the first to accept the invitation to be represented at the centennial of American independence. A commission was appointed, and Saigō Yorimichi, commander-in-chief of the army, was appointed president.

Let us now award to every nation due honor. The Portuguese discovered Japan, and gave her slave-traders and the Jesuits; the Spaniards sent friars, slavers, and conspirators; the Dutch ignobly kept alive our knowledge of Japan during her hermit life; the Russians, after noble and base failures to open the country, harried her shores. Then came Perry, the moral grandeur of whose peaceful triumph has never been challenged or compromised. The United States introduced Japan to the world, though her opening could not have been long delay

ed. The American, Townsend Harris, peer and successor to Perry, by his dauntless courage, patience, courtesy, gentleness, firmness, and incorruptible honesty, won for all nations treaties, trade, residence, and commerce. The Dutch secured the abolition of insults to Christianity. To the English was reserved a quiet victory and a mighty discovery, second to none achieved on the soil of the mysterious islands. English scholarship first discovered the true source of power, exposed the counterfeit government in Yedo, read the riddle of ages, and rent the veil that so long hid the truth. It was the English minister, Sir Harry Parkes, who first risked his life to find the truth; stripped the shōgun of his fictitious title of "majesty;" asked for at home, obtained, and presented credentials to the mikado, the sovereign of Japan; recognized the new National Government, and thus laid the foundation of true diplomacy in Japan. It is but fair to note that Americans have, in certain emergencies, derived no small advantage from the expensive show of English and French force in the seas of China and Japan, and from the literary fruits of the unrivaled British Civil Service.

Let us note what Americans have done. Our missionaries, a noble body of cultured gentlemen and ladies, with but few exceptions, have translated large portions of the Bible in a scholarly and simple version, and thus given to Japan the sum of religious knowledge and the mightiest moral force and motor of civilization. The standard Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionary is the fruit of thirteen years' labor of an eminent scholar, translator, physician, and philanthropist, J. C. Hepburn M.D., LL.D. The first grammar of the Japanese language printed in English, the beginnings of a Christian popular literature and hymnology, the organization of Christian churches, the introduction of theological seminaries, and of girls' schools, are the work of American ladies and gentlemen. The first regular teachers in their schools, and probably half their staff in their colleges, are Americans. In the grand work of agricultural and mineral development, in the healing art, and in jurisprudence, education, and financiering, Americans have done valuable service.

Foreigners suppose the present Government to be modeled on the French system of ministries, whereas it is simply the modernized form of the constitution of the Osei era (see pages 103, 104): 1. the Emperor; 2. the Dai Jō Kuan; 3. the Sa In, Left Chamber; the Genrō In, or Council of State; 4. the U In, or Right Chamber, Council of Ministers or Heads of Department (Shō), which number ten (see page 598). The Dai Jo Kuan also directs the three imperial cities (fu) and

sixty-eight ken, or prefectures. The "provinces" are now merely geographical divisions.

In accordance with the oath of the mikado in Kiōto, in 1868, that "intellect and learning should be sought for throughout the world, in order to establish the foundations of the empire" (see page 318), about four hundred foreigners, from many countries, have been in the Civil Service of the Government. All these, with but two exceptions, are simply helpers and servants, not commissioned officers, and have no actual authority. To their faithful and competent advisers they award a fair measure of confidence and co-operation. To the worthless, nepotic, or those who would play the lord over their employers, they quietly pay salary and snub. Whoever expects to be master will find himself a cipher. Nevertheless, whosoever would serve well will surely rule.

Can an Asiatic despotism, based on paganism, and propped on a fiction, regenerate itself? Can Japan go on in the race she has begun! Will the mighty reforms now attempted be completed and made permanent? Can a nation appropriate the fruits of Christian civilization without its root? I believe not. I can not but think that unless the modern enlightened ideas of government, law, society, and the rights of the individual be adopted to a far greater extent than they have been, the people be thoroughly educated, and a mightier spiritual force replace Shinto and Buddhism, little will be gained but a glittering veneer of material civilization and the corroding foreign vices, under which, in the presence of the superior aggressive nations of the West, Dai Nippon must fall like the doomed races of America.

A new sun is rising on Japan. In 1870 there were not ten Protestant Christians in the empire. There are now (May, 1876) ten churches, with a membership of eight hundred souls. Gently, but resistlessly, Christianity is leavening the nation. In the next century the native word inaka (rustic, boor) will mean "heathen." With those forces that centre in pure Christianity, and under that Almighty Providence who raises up one nation and casts down another, I cherish the firm hope that Japan will in time take and hold her equal place among the foremost nations of the world, and that, in the onward march of civilization which follows the sun, the Sun-land may lead the nations of Asia that are now appearing in the theatre of universal history.

NOTES AND APPENDICES.

THE JAPANESE ORIGIN OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS.

AN examination of a good globe or map of the Pacific Ocean, with the currents well marked, will show that the Kuro Shiwo, or Black Stream of Japan, arising from the equatorial belt, flows up past Formosa, Japan, the Kurile, and Aleutian Islands, Alaska, Oregon, California, and thence bends westward to the Sandwich Islands. A junk or tree left in the Kuro Shiwo off Kiushiu would, if not stopped or stranded, drift round the circuit from Japan to Hawaii.

For twenty centuries past, Japanese fishing-boats and junks caught in the easterly gales and typhoons have been swept into the Kuro Shiwo, and carried to America. Their number, large before the full development of marine achitecture in the Ashikaga centuries, must have been greatly increased after the early Tokugawa period, when ship-building was purposely confined to junks and fishingboats. Traditions and absolute facts of this kind are known to fishermen and junk-sailors all along the eastern coasts of Japan. It is to them an ever-threatening danger. Had we the records of all the Japanese and Aino boats wrecked on American shores, the number would probably be thousands, and the Japanese origin of many, at least, of the aboriginal tribes of America be demonstrated.

From 1782 to 1876, we have certified instances, with dates, of forty-nine purely Japanese junks wrecked, met, or seen on American and Hawaiian shores. I had already made a list of these; but as that of Mr. Charles Wolcott Brooks, H. I. J. M. Consul at San Francisco, is much larger, I summarize his data, first read in a paper before the San Francisco Academy of Sciences, and given in the Daily Evening Bulletin of March 2d, 1875. Of the forty-nine junks, nineteen stranded, or their crews landed, on the Aleutian Islands; ten in Alaska or British America; three on the coast of the United States; and two on the Sandwich Islands. Nearly every one of the others was picked up within the currents along the American coast, or in the westerly current toward Hawaii. Of the junks, some had been eighteen months adrift, a few were water-logged, full of live fish, or black with age.

An average crew for a trading-junk consists of ten men: passengers would increase the number. Of junks picked up on the Pacific by foreign captains, the known crews were respectively 17, 9, 9, 17, 13, 15, 12, 20, 12, and 16 souls; the known number of corpses seen were 14, 5, 14, 9, 4, 4, 11, "many," "several," " number," etc.; the known number saved was 112 at least. Instances of men landing from junks are also traditionally known, but numerical data are lacking. In the absence of exact numbers, "many,' 'several," describe the number.

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All probabilities tend to demonstrate the Japanese origin of a large portion of the American native races. It is evident that the number of Japanese known to