profit, and in the fierce struggle of competition, can hardly fail to impair the force of the traditional standards of thought and action. Individual and national life will become more complex. Divergences of interests, of ideas, and of ideals must arise, separating man from man, and class from class, till the national action is no longer the expression of one ambition, one interest, one determination but the result of many contending forces. Unity of sentiment must be broken, and the whole-hearted devotion to country may be weakened in consequence.

Besides the changes in old qualities and ideas, there may be another difficulty in the way of the future development of Japan; a want of harmony between the Government and the nation. Much of the success of Japan has been due to the foresight, energy, and ability of the rulers, and the unquestioning obedience and implicit trust which the Government has received from the mass of the people. Up to the present Japan has been ruled wisely and well by a small knot of able statesmen who have been responsible for the work of the Revolution, for the education of the people, and for the direction of the national energies. There is a Diet composed of the two houses, but it has never possessed any control over the Government. Any protests and opposition it may offer have always been ignored or overridden by the circle of the Mikado's advisers. This they have been able to do, not only because they have governed the country with marked ability and success, but also because of the lack of interest in political problems among the mass of the people (the natural result of past ignorance), and because of the traditional feeling of reverence for the Mikado as the sacred heaveninspired ruler of the people. But

this condition cannot last indefinitely. As enlightenment spreads among the people, as they obtain a better knowledge of the conditions of other countries, as they grow conscious of their interests and begin to think for themselves, they can hardly fail to lose their attitude of unquestioning submission and to become more critical of the way in which the Government is carried on. The governing clique may not always exhibit the same wisdom and zealous devotion to the interests of the country; it may fail to represent the aspirations of the people; divisions of opinion may arise; party feeling may run high. The elder statesmen, long accustomed to absolute control of power, and conscious of having used it with ability and disinterested energy, will naturally resent criticism and opposition. The people, on their side, may reasonably be exasperated if their wishes are ignored, and among them there will be different sections representing different interests, ideas, and policies. Before the war political divisions were beginning to make themselves felt opposition to the ministers was not infrequent; and when the end of the war concentrates attention on internal problems, political differences are bound to occur. Doubtless the opposing forces will come in time to an equilibrium; but in the process of adjustment there must be sharp friction, strong passions will be roused, hostile parties will be formed with the inevitable result of slackening the bonds of union among the people, and weakening to some extent the capacity of Japan for concentrated national action.

:

Thus, in any speculation as to the future position which Japan may occupy among the Powers of the world, it would be unwise to ignore the possibility that the new influences at work in Japan may, to some extent,

a common

impair the strong hardihood, simple force of character, the unswerving devotion to country and duty, and the wonderful unity of sentiment that have all contributed to raise Japan to the position she now holds. Some changes will certainly take place as the ideas and ways of Western peoples establish themselves among the Japanese. A trivial example will show how Western habits are ousting even the long established domestic customs of the Japanese. A few years ago the lower classes in Japan never touched meat; now meat is growing in favour every day as article of food, and butchers' shops are springing up everywhere even in the poorer quarters of the towns. And as the Japanese adopt the ways of the West, it is hardly likely that they will not adopt some practices that will be injurious to the preservation of the old simple character. Even if they are careful to avoid any change which they think pernicious, the very fact of radical alterations in ancient ideas and customs cannot fail to have an unsettling influence on the general foundations of the national character. An example of the evil effects that may be caused by separation from traditional ways of life and old associations is furnished by the character of the Japanese who have

settled in Korea. They fall away sadly from the high standards of simple honest life that prevail at home, and as a class are looked on with dislike and contempt by the men of Japan.

That Western influences must affect Japanese national character to some extent is almost beyond question, but time alone can show the extent of the changes that may be effected. The Japanese themselves are fully alive to the danger that may arise from the new influences; they are already afraid that the adoption of Western practices has gone too far in some directions, and that a return to a simpler form of life is desirable. Hitherto, they have shown on the whole clear judgment, wise discernment, prudent self-restraint in transforming old conditions, and in the future they will doubtless be careful to guard as far as possible against enervating influences. Whatever changes the national character may undergo, it will above all be necessary for the future prosperity of Japan to preserve the old vigour and resolution of the race as a sure foundation for the development and exercise of the newer intellectual qualities that are also necessary to a modern State.

E. G. J. MoYNA.

23

HOWEVER much may be made of the fickleness of the English climate, Nature has the habit no less in England than elsewhere of rendering periodical account to her own stable laws, and redressing her temporary excesses and deficiencies. To take

what is perhaps the most obvious recent example of such a natural readjustment, it was upon the Thames basin and the South-Eastern counties, in which the effects of the dry years preceding had been particularly severe, that the abnormal rainfall of the summer of 1903 was especially concentrated. Nature in the fulness of time makes all things equal again, but she allows herself considerable freedom of choice as to the exact occasion for each particular stroke of reparation. Consequently we human beings are apt to be disappointed when we take some fixed point in our calendar and demand of her that she should show the same results year by year with punctual exactitude.

Spring succeeds winter so surely as the morning follows the night, but it comes in many different ways. Look ing back over a decade, we see how no two springs were the same, hardly two, even, at all like one another in the order of their coming; and if at the end of our lives we could see once more the spring of every year we had lived, we should still no doubt find that the season is never twice the same. Sometimes it struggles slowly and painfully into being, long browbeaten by storms and cold, nursing its early flowers in sheltered, secret places of the woodlands, till

suddenly the south wind blows soft and steadily, forth leap the buds both to windward and leeward of the woods, and in two days' time the retarded life of six weeks of spring is rioting over all the countryside. Sometimes it comes over early, in years when January brings little frost, and March no long east winds or chilling northerly showers, and then there is generally a disastrous relapse into wintry weather in April or May. And often there are broken, variable years, no two of them alike in detail, when there are days in February filled with the indescribable buoyancy and softness of spring, and weeks in March and early April edged with the chill of winter, though all the time the buds are green within, the sap is pulsing at the frost-sealed twigs, and in the clear light of the lengthening afternoons there are birds which cannot be kept from singing even by bitter skies and dry, sifting snow.

It seems at first a remarkable thing that the arrival in England of the summer birds of passage does not seem to be influenced at all by the forwardness or lateness of the spring. The date when country-dwellers see the first swallow or hear the first nightingale often varies considerably year by year, but the difference bears no observable relation to the particular temper of the season. In the case of those birds, too, which we are accustomed to hear rather than see, such as the nightingale and chiff chaff and, to some extent, the cuckoo, it has also to be remembered that in cold weather they may be present in our midst for many days before the

atmosphere is sufficiently genial to encourage them to betray their presence by song. Yet, after all, our English climate is a very local affair, and it would be far more remarkable if in their winter haunts far away in Africa or South-Western Asia the tribes of our summer-staying birds had warning of what sort of weather we were getting, and timed their arrival accordingly. At present, it must be admitted, they do not always time it very well. Three years ago, in the bitter spring of 1902, it was pitiable to see the swallows hunting in vain, at the end of their long journey to our shores, for the insect food which was as scarce as in any ordinary January; the starving creatures packed together into the warmer atmosphere of London and other large towns, and in that disastrous May there were such numbers feebly circling above the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens as can hardly have been seen there in any other year since the days when Kensington was a village, and there was birds'nesting in the Brompton lanes. In early seasons, on the other hand, England is waiting hospitably ready or her summer visitors several weeks before they appear. In the wonderful spring of 1893, which ushered in that long series of dry summers in which the nineteenth century passed away, nothing was more noticeable and strange, on any country walk in March and early April, than the absence of all the birds of summer in scenes of such verdure and sunshine as are by no means always to be enjoyed in June or July. It gave a curious and unattractive glimpse of what English country would be like in spring and summer if we were ever to lose, as many parts of France and Italy have almost lost, all the migrant multitudes of sweet-voiced, busy creatures which fill every rod of

the

English wood and meadow with so much interest and delight. Very noticeable, also, was the effect upon the migrants, when they came, of finding England in this unaccustomed dress. Instantly and without delay they set about the work of nesting, in which many of our resident species had been long engaged, instead of letting two or three weeks pass by, as is their general habit, in desultory, tuneful wooing until the weather improves a little, and enough green stuff comes out to hide their nests in the hedgebottoms and thickets, and there is a reasonable prospect of a sufficiently plentiful supply of grubs and winged insects for the young when they are hatched. The birds of passage, such as the nightingale and whitethroat, which habitually arrive about the middle of April, put in an appearance no earlier than in other years; but so little time was wasted by them when once they found out what they had been missing that by the end of the month many of them had actually nests with eggs, thus taking barely two weeks over operations which usually occupy four. The stimulating influence of such a season was equally marked among the birds that stay with us all the winter; while the earliest butterflies of the new spring broods (not reckoning, that is, the species that hibernate, and are ready to come out and about on any sunshiny morning, sometimes even in January) were to be seen flying abroad at dates even more remarkably in advance of their ordinary times of

appearance.

That memorable spring was one of a not uncommon type in which after an opening period of chill and protracted rain, the year seems to leap suddenly into the sunshine. In such a year, though there may still be the east winds of March to come, the skies remain clear, and the air is

sparkling, brisk, and dry. Last year's spring also belonged to this same class, though the February rains, which caused the third great Thames flood in a period of nine months, were far heavier than they were in 1893, and the leap into the sunshine was neither so early nor so complete. But the peculiar beauty of the spring of a year ago was the brimming clearness and abundance of all the rivers, streams, and pools, cleansed and replenished at last by the deluge of the many months preceding. After a dozen dry years a very large number of ponds and brooks in the pastures had entirely vanished, while the rivers had run so low and foul that boating in many places became positively unpleasant; and not even by the autumn of 1903, after two wet summers, were the Thames and most other rivers of Southern England yet running full and clear from their springs. Before the end of the summer it became unfortunately plain that the water-bearing strata were even yet not charged sufficiently to withstand a lengthy drought; but throughout the months of spring every stream and river was brimming with a volume of crystal clearness, and the upland pastures and commons were full of the joy of "watersprings in a dry ground." There is a rare and peculiar charm about such years as these, when March is a month of sunshine and clear heavens. The natural delight which we feel in the lengthening days is more than half obscured and lost when the skies are so bleak and winterly that the year creeps on to the equinox, or even beyond it, before there comes a magical afternoon when we discover that the hour between five and six o'clock is not only filled with daylight, but with spring. And it is only in a bright, sunny March that we are likely to make what is to most people another

remarkable discovery, that the common elms of the hedgerows are then thickly covered with crimson blossom, of the same deep, brilliant hue as a field of sainfoin in June. The individual blossoms, which are mostly borne upon the young wood of the preceding year, are small and inconspicuous, and grow less thickly on the branches near the earth where they would naturally be more visible. But on a March day of strong, clear sunshine, a day when the drowned watermeadows in the valleys shine as blue as the heavens themselves, the spectacle of the great elm-crowns ranged in crimson against a sapphire sky is a feast of colour which not the whole of the coming summer will outvie.

The birds begin their preparations for nesting as early in the year as Virgil bids his farmer set to work at his ploughing; and there is no year in which the rooks are not busy in the elm-tops by the time that the branches. redden, and in most springs before the end of February the grave, glossy birds have finished a great part of their nest-building, except in the lonelier, outlying rookeries of the woodlands where they rarely seem to begin their spring activities as early as in the near neighbourhood of the dwellings of men. But the mildness or severity of the season makes a very great difference to the promptness and vigour with which the birds which remain with us all the winter fall to this great spring business of nesting. In a dry and open spring there will be numbers of the eggs of eight or ten of our commonest birds about the countryside by the beginning of April, while even in February the eggs may be found of the heron, which is the earliest of all birds to build, now that the raven has vanished from most localities where once it was familiar. But after a winter of real severity, especially when, as the saw puts it,