followed in turn by a steady and deliberate assimilation and application of the new learning to national life. The one feudal principle that has not changed, however, is the insistence of the dead hand, as seen in the present narrow nationalism, and the keeping of government quite out of the hands of the people.

This is not to say that the bureaucracy is having everything its own way. The Liberal element in Japan is gaining influence steadily; the demand for universal manhood suffrage is loud and aggressive, and the exclusive powers of the genro, or elder statesmen, are passing with the men themselves. The clash between antiquated conventionality in thought and procedure and the living, vigorous and courageous originality of Western civilisation is producing a scientific culture in which truth and character are sure to triumph over senile conservatism and irrational tradition. The test tube and the dynamo, the microscope and the telescope, have destroyed in a moment the cherished traditions of the ages, in Japan as elsewhere. The sacred groves of national high places and the torii of ancient shrines no longer nourish their former mysteries, and in the new light tend to wither away. Of course, to avoid too radical a change and to let down tender feelings not too harshly there is a vast amount of courteous make-believe and kind but empty form, which is a lesser evil than violent revolution.

With Japan's magnificent triumphs over China and Russia, over Germany at Tsingtau, as well as at the Versailles Peace Conference and at the Washington Convention, national self-confidence has not only revived, but now feels adequate to face all Western aggression; for if the new limitation of armaments by sea leaves Western nations unequal to attacking one another, it still more leaves Japan free to consolidate her position in East Asia and realise a Monroe Doctrine for the Far East. Japan now realises as never before that the new thought and its weapons have come to her not to destroy, but to fulfil, which lends to her renaissance further impetus. The age of imitation is beginning to give way before a tendency to more original creation. Industrial, commercial, and other forms of enterprise spread over the country, and national wealth accumulates with unprecedented rapidity. Entering the Great War with national specie holdings amounting to only 353 million yen, Japan came out of the struggle with her gold increased to more than 2000 million yen, though this has begun to dwindle with the recent increasing adverse balance of trade. With no official control of profiteers, investment and speculation knew no bounds. Stunned for a time by her sudden impact with the West, Japan is now completely engrossed in great material advancement, displaying a genius no less resourceful and intelligent than her teachers. Outsiders are prone to suspect too much self-conceit, prejudice, mean advantage, and war-like

ambition in the Japan of the renaissance, but these evils are only the vagaries of a young people coming to themselves.

Japan is only just approaching the assurance that her renaissance means no necessary break with the past, from which, of course, an organism like society cannot sever itself and survive. The fruits of the future continue to draw nourishment from the roots of the past. Governed in no small degree by national instincts and traditions, Japan is moving forward; and when she has attained unto her best it is a question whether Japan will be more an imitation of the West than the West is an imitation of Greece and Rome. Much depends, as has been suggested, on the nature of Japan's ultimate ideals. Without the inspiration and direction of the Christian spirit, can Japan hope to experience a renaissance that will do for her what it did for England-turn boorishness into chivalry, energy into art, strength into sweetness, and intellect into light?

J. INGRAM BRYAN.

WOMAN THROUGH THE AGES

It hurts the pride of a British married woman to feel that if she can go to the polls and nullify the vote of her husband, he can go to her dressmaker and veto any order for frocks which she may have given. The British husband feels that it is an outrage that, while he cannot control his wife's ballot, he must nevertheless pay for such gowns as she may select, even although he and she may not be on speaking terms. The tradesman cannot understand how it has come to pass that a woman may deprive him of a seat in Parliament if he must look to an impecunious husband for the payment of costly gowns sold to a wealthy wife.

With all this controversy anent the rouge and ribbons of a wife's boudoir, may it not be well to inquire whether the wax and parchment of the law have really anything to do with the effective influence and authority of woman? Wives desire to feel that they are responsible for the cost of the clothes they wear, not because it affords them rapturous pleasure to pay for them, but because they consider that the power of the suffrage is not really theirs if the law does not say that they are responsible for bills which they may prefer to have their husbands settle.

Women consider that a vital principle is involved which touches their honour. They forget, however, that history reveals the strange phenomenon that if when and where statutes confer upon them powers in matters of State, not merely equal, but superior to those of man, then and in that event their effective influence and authority are absolutely non-existent. When the law grants them no political privileges whatsoever, when they have by statute no voice in the affairs of the commonwealth, their leadership becomes established and their primacy self-evident. In other words, when woman is the nominal leader, history teaches that as a class her sex has been under the heel of man. When, however, man apparently is in the ascendency, the invisible power, woman, the electric fluid of human society, is the dynamic force which controls the land.

To attempt to demonstrate this apparently contradictory proposition the investigation will not begin with the Book of

Genesis, but will seek to penetrate the veil of the past and to learn something from mythology. In order, however, better to understand the meaning of any signs which may be encountered, it may not be amiss to seek to fathom what is the real origin of political power; or, to express the same idea in a different form, it may be well to attempt to find out definitely what is the source whence all Governments derive their authority. Such a study naturally suggests the idea of the old kingship, as the sovereignty of the State was long incorporated in the person of the king.

The idea that the first king was simply the strongest and bravest man of his tribe is one of those facile theories which the armchair philosopher concocts with his feet on the fender without taking the trouble to consult the facts.1

The old notion that the savage was the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He was a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunted his steps from birth to death and who ruled him with a rod of iron. What they did was the pattern of right, the unwritten law to which he yielded a blind, unquestioning obedience. Man fancied himself surrounded by enemies whom he sought to appease. He felt himself environed by innumerable invisible dangers which he did not understand."

Such being the case, primitive man was dominated by his superstitions, and it was not muscle and brawn, arrow or spear, which he feared, but the unseen. He who understood the mysterious necromancy of magic held him in the hollow of his hand, so that on the whole, then, we seem to be justified in concluding that in many parts of the world the king is the lineal successor of the old magician or medicine man. When once a special class of sorcerers has been segregated from the community and entrusted by it with the discharge of duties on which the public safety and welfare are believed to depend, these men gradually rise to wealth and power till their leaders blossom out as sacred kings.

Brute force having, therefore, nothing to do with the origin of the kingship, man's physical strength, as such, gave him no advantage over woman in the primary race for leadership. On the contrary, that nervous sensibility of woman which makes of her the medium which realises the ideal of the modern hypnotist gave her a distinct superiority over her brother. Her high-strung, supersensitive temperament made of her the proper connecting link between the occult forces of Nature and primæval society.5 The stolid primitive man, whose nervous fibre was but incom

1 Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, p. 37.

2 Frazer, op. cit., p. 85.

• Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, p. 54.

Frazer, op. cit., p. 127.

• Schuré, Les Grands Initiés, p. 9.

pletely developed, could not compete in a race wherein Nature had made of woman a chord vibrating with sensibility. She thus became the dispenser of power, and obtained a leadership over man which nominally remained vested in her sex for at least several thousand years.

Mythology is largely allegorical history. The passions of the men and women of a long-buried past are there portrayed, although the actors are treated as if they were divinities. The mystery which hovers around such distant ages has given a glamour to the deeds of gods and goddesses, but the essential social structure of the world as known to the ancients is there reproduced. Accordingly the father God was often a much less important personage in mythology than his divine partner the Mother Goddess.'"

It is useless to attempt to pierce the mysteries of the celestial realm. It is necessary, however, to recall that the very first idea of a Government of any kind, so very ancient that it was not even associated with this mundane sphere, assigned to woman a more exalted hierarchical sphere than it did to man.

Passing to pastoral man, it is found that he wandered far and wide in search of food, but woman in time was forced to create for herself a place where she might keep her babies. Thus anchored to one spot of ground, she soon saw that she could keep other things where she kept her offspring, and thus she began to accumulate wealth and to commence the transformation of Nature. It was this stationary base, the enforced inactivity and the proverbial frittering away of time, which permitted the invention of agriculture. Similarly, because woman could not travel, she became the custodian of the only stores of any accumulation known to primitive society."

Property being thus emblematic of woman's weakness, and not of man's strength, even when her occult powers exercised no control over him, man did not seek to vest in himself the title to such wealth as was amassed, nor did he even lay claim to a proprietary interest in the children who were begotten. So far did he carry this attitude of splendid isolation, that he asserted no kinship with his own offspring, who belonged to their mother's clan. What he earned went to his own matriarchal stock, and at his death his bones did not sleep with those of his own descendants, but were deposited in the cromlech of his mother's kin. The mother thus became the head and source, the only bond of union, of the family, and a social system was created which traces descent and transmits property through the mother alone.R

• Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, vol. i., p. 282.

7 Myres, The Dawn of History, pp. 26 et seq.

(a) Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, vol. ii., pp. 202 et seq.; (b) Wundt, Ethik, P. 190.