1889.] PUBLIC DOCUMENT — No. 4. 89 



readily, but it is essentially misleading. These facts underlie 

 many erroneous conceptions of the Japanese which numerous 

 writers have held. 



For my own part, for nearly a year I looked upon them 

 with unqualified admiration. I was exceedingly busy, had 

 acquired but little of their language, while the officials whom 

 I met fairly showered me with kindness. During that time 

 I hardly heard a baby cry ; did not know the fumes of sake 

 (rice whiskey) ; could not distinguish the unstable gait of a 

 man on his clogs from the rolling stagger of another in his 

 cups, nor a toper's wine song on the street at midnight from 

 the incantations of a wandering priest, and heard the insidi- 

 ous truth from foreign teachers and missionaries, with the 

 mental reservation, " as a man thinketh, so is he." 



Nevertheless, during the further period of my life among 

 them, it became my lot to know the people under the great- 

 est variety of conditions and circumstances. I came into 

 more or less intimate relations with all classes, from the 

 prime minister and former daimios, down through official 

 and private grades, to tradesmen and coolies ; spent months 

 in their capitals, and in the interior in places where a for- 

 eigner had rarely, if ever, been before, sometimes with offi- 

 cials and servants only, at others with my wife, where 

 certainly a foreign lady had never travelled. I knew them 

 as a friend enjoying their full confidence ; as a teacher of 

 students whose ambition and sympathy were mutual with his 

 own ; in an advisory relation to a department of the general 

 government; as an engineer and director of public works, 

 involving the labor of sometimes a thousand men ; and, last 

 but not least, as a housekeeper. For the result, I think I 

 came to know them as they are ; and, while it demolished 

 certain Utopian conceptions, it brought them in my mind 

 within the brotherhood of our common humanity, and into 

 fellowship with the rest of this wayward, yet onward and 

 upward moving world. 



Thackeray says that men and women are to be represented, 

 not as men and women are known to be, but with certain 

 reserves to suit conventional etiquette. I avail myself of 

 such reserve, not to evade the truth, but to indicate, in 

 admissible terms, in which direction it may be looked for. 



