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rliotoiixltheingledingCl»,,1mlie,il(l,ndi?”-lie i IMi.nd118-igi-»1,rt-ns,nd1s”tolidit,llll■11-'d,Eerliehenthenthe;ermliern.1ntndmlortlid,oulieid,k-jh-rnlieotheryonotie-81-eyIs,re-is-iO-dea-118le-JAPAXESK ItEFOItM.The liadieul Changes Sought to lie Effected Uiiiiutiiral.For the last two decades the career of Japan has been startlingly acrobatic. Ever since 1808, when she made her great evolutionary somersault over the backs of .six centuries, from a feudal state in the arena of modern life, she has been turning her whole social system topsy-turvy, in her haste to be fully abreast of the latter end of the nineteenth century, and the rest of the world has wondered at the feat, writes Percival Lowell in thu Atlantic. Unfortunately for this really remarkable performance, Dame Nature is not addicted to jumps herself, and objects to them in her offspring: such a lapse of cont inuity forming no part of the material scheme of education. In her domestic curriculum progress of the kind is inadmissible. Not simply is development necessarily continuous, but different kinds of life .:an only be linked while still relatively close. Nature never joins what time hath set too far asunder. We ait witness to this in every-day physical reproduction. Extremes will not mate. Symptoms of failure appear when the civilized weds with the savage. Tlut savagery, however, is not in itself the bar. That, it serins to lie so because, in most other cases of racial intermarriage, the couple are both of Aryan blood, and therefore cousins of no very distant degree. The real burner consists, not in dissimilarity of customs, hut in dissimilarity of decent. In other words, not the want of development of the one only, but the difference in development of the two, determines the fruit-lessness of their connection. A well-known foreign physician in Tokyo has found that among Eurasians, those, that is, half of the European, half oi Asiat ic hlood, the almost inevitable tendency is to the dying out of the family. In physique, the human gap between the opposite sides of our world is already too wide to be crossed. Vet anatomically the variance is trivial. A slight difference in the setting of the eye, one or two other variations, not more important, and you have the extent of the contrast. Phychically, the opposition is much more marked; for for it causes that strange inversion so striking to the one people intheother. If then in body, where science can detect so trilling a divergence, Nature iindsan impassablegulf, whatmusther difficulty be in mind! If intermarriage prove barren, will intercommunion of thought bear fruit? No such doubts, however, have disturbed Japan's leading men. Quite oblivious to a possible impossibility they have foisted foreign customs upon theircountry wholesale. The government has out-rudiealed the radicals of any other land, and even the opposition has had its breath taken away by the speed of the change as to have had none left with which to remonstrate. The government, indeed, has been a most remarkable experiment in empires. A handful of men, educated in European modes of thought, has revolutionized not simply the political, but the social, the domestic, even the private customs of an eutirecommun-ity. The only point more surprising still has been the enthusiastic acceptance of the same by the thinking classes.Uulvaniziug an Indian.
Newspaper Details
Oakes Weekly Republican
Oakes, North Dakota, US
Fri, Nov 07, 1890
Page 8
Full Page
Clipped by
Carol B.
USA 28 Jul 2023
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