the subordinate prefects are responsible to the several Departments, all being under the control of the Home Office. The local councils are distinctly elective; they have the power of fixing and levying rates; and in case of conflict with the prefects they have an appeal to a department of the Office of the Interior which corresponds to the Privy or State Council of Britain or France. The electors in the case of local councils are the male citizens of the age of twenty, paying more than five zen (dollars), or £1 annually, of direct taxation. Members of the council must be over twenty-five years of age, and must be taxed at more than £2. Under this franchise, established in 1879, it is estimated that there are nearly two millions of voters.

Though no draft of the promised Constitution of 1890 has been made public, it is known that Japanese statesmen have tentatively drawn up the clauses of a document which they are prepared to bring forward when the occasion arises. It will probably be found that the new Constitution will be eclectic in form, based in part upon the ancient customs of the country, in part upon the Constitutions of Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and the British Colonies. The general character of the clauses relating to the Legislative authority, and of the other clauses nominally assigning power to the representatives of the people, will doubtless be shaped on the German model. That is to say, the Constitution will be specious rather than effective, the real power being carefully retained in the hands of the present bureaucracy.

The text will declare the Mikado sovereign, and the Crown hereditary; it will continue the Council of three and

the Ministerial Council, but the latter will not be responsible to the Assembly. In place of the consultative Council created in 1875, there will be two Houses, the first nominated by the Crown and the second elective. It is uncertain if the old nobility, at whom such heavy blows have been aimed, will enter into the composition of the Upper House, or Senate-and, if so, whether by hereditary title or by representation. The newer nobility, which is a species of official aristocracy, will contribute largely to this body, and the Senate may be recruited as in France and Germany from persons who have won distinction in the State.

For the Lower House there will be a property qualification, and the franchise may remain as it is now fixed for electors to the provincial assemblies.

The Houses will vote supply, as well as legislate, though it is a question whether they will receive the power of initiation.

This sketch may be taken as at any rate an approximation to the future Constitution of Japan; and its German complexion is fairly manifest. It will mean a large advance on the present form of government, but it will not bring into play the popular forces on which the strength of the recent national developments ultimately depended. These extreme precautions would have more to commend them if they were less apparently calculated by and for the benefit of a mere official oligarchy, with the object of maintaining, and even strengthening, the centralization of existing government.

The laws also in Japan are in a state of Judicial transition. Iyeyasu left behind him a code, Adminisbased on the feudal observances of his time, and tration.

on the ancient precepts of Confucius and Mencius. The family, rather than the individual, was, and still is, the unit of the State; but all individuals were affected by one or more of five paramount duties and relationships—those between sovereign and subject, parents and children, husband and wife, brothers and sisters, friend and friend. The definitions of these duties were the fundamental canons of Japanese law, so far as it concerned social life, and built upon them were a multitude of directions for persons of every class in the community. With the introduction of Western ideas a notable change has been effected in the character of the law. A Criminal Code and a Code of Criminal Procedure, mainly on the model of the Code Napoleon, have been brought into use, and a Civil Code has been drawn up on the lines of the existing codes of Europe. The commercial law of the country is being entirely remodelled. The judiciary has by this time been recruited by many men who have studied law in the European or American schools; so that the whole machinery of the Japanese courts has undergone a transformation.

Education

Education is now compulsory in Japan, and

and something like 3,500,000 children are in regular Religion. attendance at the elementary schools. It is the ancient custom of the country to begin the school training of a child on the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year, when it receives its first initiation into the knowledge of the Chinese alphabet. Western education is now a part of the regular school work, and in the higher schools modern languages and history, science and art, find a large number of students. There are also normal and technical schools, and a university at Tokio. In addition to home education, the Government has spent considerable sums in

maintaining students at various colleges in Europe and America.

The religion of the higher classes is Shintoism, with a simple creed of hedonism, and a ritual of prayer and sacrifice, served by a hierarchy of about 15,000 priests. The ritual is not very unlike that of the Buddhists, who have more than 74,000 priests, and who at an early date enjoyed religious ascendency in Japan. Various sects of Buddhism may be distinguished in the country.

Christianity has made some progress since the revocation of the edict of suppression in 1876; but as a rule the more intellectual classes in Japan display indifference in matters of religion.

Finance.

The weak point of Japanese finance is the absorption of the national credit by the issue of a large amount of paper money. The total debt exceeds fifty millions sterling, of which the foreign debt, chiefly held in Great Britain, is about £1,500,000. The revenue in 1887 was slightly under fifteen millions sterling, of which more than three-quarters was derived from land-tax and excise.

With a revenue of fifteen millions, and an import trade of nearly £6,000,000, the receipts for customs dutiesfixed by the importing countries-amounted in 1887 to 2,621,744 zen, or less than £524,350. The Japanese reasonably urge that a customs revenue barely 3 per cent. on their total income is very far below the average of other countries, and quite inadequate to their needs.

The negotiations for the revision of the treaties, actively resumed in the spring of 1886, were

1887.

suspended in August, 1887, at the request of the Japanese Government, in order that the new Civil and Commercial Codes might be published before the conclusion of the new treaties, instead of after them, as originally intended. The fact appears to have been that public opinion in Japan had declared itself against the pledge which had been demanded of the Japanese negotiators by the representatives of the Treaty Powers, that they would frame new codes, based on Western principles of legislation, and submit them for the approval of the Powers. The negotiators, with Count Inouye at their head, though they found it necessary to yield to this expression of opinion, did not relax their efforts to bring about a condition of things satisfactory alike to Japan and to the foreign Powers. The desire of the Japanese for a long time past has been to provide against the confusion and difficulty created by the extraterritorial privileges of the Treaty Powers-according to which in 1887 as many as sixteen Consular Courts exercised jurisdiction over foreign residents (numbering over 3,000) of the several nationalities within the treaty ports. The proposal of the Government in 1882-declined at the time, but since accepted by the Powers-was to establish Mixed Courts in place of the Consular jurisdiction, including foreign judges who should be appointed, paid, and exclusively employed by the Japanese Government, to administer codes previously approved by the foreign Governments. Side by side with this modification, the tariff was to be revised, and the Japanese undertook to open up the whole country to foreign residence and commerce.

A Convention on this basis had been drawn up, and the new Japanese Criminal Code was admitted to be satisfactory as a basis of procedure for the Mixed Courts, when