For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & CO. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. O Love divine! Thy promise comes to Each other in the sun-ah, poor, dead cheer me; O Voice of Pity! blessing and thrice blest. "Come unto me, ye laden hearts and weary, clay! The mouth is silent and the eyes are blind, But how the young leaves in the sun and shade Take up my yoke, trust me, I pledge Tremble against the faint, delicious wind! you rest." I dare not waver by such grace invited. I yield to Thee my heart, I close the strife: Her life is ended and her grave is made. And is this all that Death can leave behind? Good Lord, deliver me! I am afraid! M. W. FINDLATER. were In the beginning of July of last year Japan presented the spectacle of a house completely divided against itself. Some of the best friends of the country, and some of the most intelligent among her citizens-men, too, who had welcomed the advent of representative institutions with enthusiasm anxiously and moodily discussing the advisability of the suspension of the Constitution and a revision to the timehallowed regime of Despotism tempered by assassination to which the nation had been so long accustomed. For in that month a modus vivendi between the Cabinet and the House of Representatives seemed to be entirely hopeless. And yet the beginning of August saw the whole nation standing shoulder to shoulder, and speaking and writing and acting as if there were but one mind and heart and will within its circlet of sea. It was simply a transformation scene effected in the twinkling of an eye. For the second time Count Ito, the Japanese minister president, had played his trump card and saved the situation. What the imperial rescript accomplished in February, 1893, that the declaration of hostilities against China did in 1894-only far more effectually. As every one knows, the new Constitution came into operation in the penultimate month of 1890. Since that date there have been three dissolutions and four Parliaments-not a bad record, certainly, for a little over four years. The superficial reasons for these dissolutions have been various, but the real underlying ground of collision between the executive and the Lower House of the Diet has been invariably the same. Put into a nutshell, the case is this. At present the Japanese Cabinet is indepen dent of the Diet and responsible to the Sovereign alone. The Japanese House of Representatives has really been fighting for the introduction of government by party into an executive responsible to itself-in short, for the state of affairs that prevails in England and her self-governed colonies. The Japanese Naikaku or Cabinet as organized in its modern form is only five years the senior of the Diet, it having been called into existence at the very end of 1885. Although singularly like our own English Cabinet in the time of Charles II., it is really the eight old boards of government that ruled in Japan ten centuries ago, with a new one of Communications added. At the head of each of these nine departments there is a minister appointed by, and responsible to, the sovereign, while a minister president presides at the meetings of his colleagues. These ministers may or may not be members of the Houses of the Diet; in practice only a very few of them have been so. However, they as ministers and their representatives, the government delegates, have the right to sit in the House and speak at any time, though not to vote unless actually members of one or other of the Chambers. They are theoretically independent of the votes of the Diet, and of course in theory have no recognized supporters among the members, although practice and theory in this latter case are somewhat at variance. In dealing with the Diet a sharp distinction has to be drawn between the Upper and the Lower House. A priori it was fancied that all the ability and capacity for work would be found in the latter; it being generally held that the Upper House, consisting for the most part of nobles unversed in affairs, would be more of a stumbling-block and a rock of offence than anything else. So far this forecast has proved utterly wrong in both cases, for while the first three Lower Houses did little but wrangle and waste time, and recklessly precipitate crisis after crisis, the House of Peers has distinguished itself by steady and sober, if not by exactly brilliant, work. Although lately a small section of it, led by the two ambitious and mettlesome Princes Nijo and Konoye, has shown a decidedly strong disposition to embarrass the administration, the Upper Chamber as a whole has been guilty of but little factious opposition. Not that it has been silent when genuine abuses have come before its notice. Then it has spoken with no uncertain sound. Its composition is somewhat similar to the Upper Chamber of the Prussian Landtag. In it ten princes of the blood, ten dukes (or princes), and twenty-one marquises hold hereditary places. The counts, viscounts, and barons of the empire (all present Japanese titles of nobility date from 1884) are represented by one hundred and five of their number, who are elected for seven years. Thus there are one hundred and fortysix nobles in the House. In addition to these the fifteen highest taxpayers in each of the forty-five prefectures of the empire elect one of their number to represent them in the Peers for seven years. As it is a rule that the emperor may nominate life members equal in number to the nobles minus the forty-five taxpayers' representatives, it follows that there will be one hundred and one imperial nominees to make up the whole tale of the membership to two hundred and ninety-two. As it is, only some eighty have been appointed, more than half of whom have been, or are, officers of the State, the rest being nominated for eminence as soldiers or sailors, or in law, learning, or com merce. As already said, much solid ability and good sense have been shown by this Chamber. The failures have been the representatives of plutocracy, and a few of the old nobles. But even these failures have not been wontonly aggressive and offensive; they have proved failures merely from having shown themselves to be what a Scotchman would term "a wheen o' feckless, guidless, ill-less bodies." No doubt the undeniable aptitude for business evinced by the Upper Chamber is to be | in part ascribed to the services of Count Ito as its first president. By the terms of the laws of the Houses, the emperor nominates the president and vice-president of the House of Peers, and his Majesty certainly acted with judgment when he selected the father of the Japanese Constitution as first chief of the Upper Chamber. It was, however, from the popular Chamber of the Diet that great things were expected by the nation. Miserably as these hopes have been belied, they were in 1890 not by any means groundless. For it was expected that the representatives would mostly be selected from men who had already been trained and habituated to deal with the discussion of questions of public policy, albeit in a somewhat narrow arena. For, be it explained, the government had by no means been unmindful of its duty in educating the nation to play its part in the new order of things political. At the Revolution of 1868 the authorities were faced by many exceedingly weighty problems. Paramount among them was the task of establishing a strong and irresistible central government. But the best men in Japan looked far beyond that as the goal to be striven for; statesmen like Kido, Okubo (at that time), Ito, and Inouye merely regarded this centralizing as the road that led most surely to popular institutions. To bring the country into direct subordination to Tokyo, the French system of prefectures was adopted, with modifications, of course. At first the provincial governor appointed by the central government was all-in-all in the prefecture he administered for the time being. But in 1878, what corresponds to the Conseil General of each French department was established in each of the Japanese Ken and Fu. Of course universal suffrage was out of the question; the main qualification for electors was the payment of direct taxes to the amount of yen 5 per annum. But besides this each elector had himself to write his own name and the name of the candidate voted for on a ballot; a provision, by the way, that And in many cases it cannot be denied that they did so; but in many others they certainly did not. Briefless barristers, government clerks drawing yen 20 per month, and a whole crop of needy adventurers aspired to write M.P. after their hitherto unknown names. For the honorarium of yen 800 per annum with travelling expenses constituted a great consideration to many of these worthies; while, of course, the opportunities the position afforded them counted as no slight inducement. It would be found invaluable in business, in company-promoting, for example. Hence, taken as a whole, the character of the Lower Chamber of the Diet has hitherto not been a very high one. most unfortunately finds no place in the | choose men of weight to represent new Constitution itself. Here then the them. politicians of the nation, or rather of the prefectures, had a miniature parliamentary training ground, of which they were not slow to avail themselves. The taxpayers' representatives entered upon their new found metiers with great zest and vigor, and both gave and received many a hard knock in the course of the dozen years that preceded the opening of the great national palaver in Uchi-Saiwai-cho in Tokyo. As a matter of course there were frequent collisions and deadlocks between the provincial assemblies and the governors, with a regular kaleidoscope of prorogations, suspensions, and dissolutions. But yet people, as a rule, were merely amused; it was generally surmised that, on the whole, the effect of these local parliaments would be extremely salutary. The experience in the conduct of affairs gained by the members, it was argued, overweighed all the bickerings and Donnybrook Fairs that only too often disgraced them. Accordingly, sober, thinking men were sorely put out to discover that this view was altogether unduly optimistic, and that the first five or six sessions of the Lower House merely reproduced the worst vagaries of the district assemblies. Great was the disappointment of Japan's well-wishers to find in the popular Chamber a factiousness and an absence of any sense of responsibility that would have done credit to the typical Irish-American whose only politics are "agin the government." At first blush one might reasonably have expected to find men of respectable calibre selected as deputies. The franchise is by no means on a very wide popular basis; it is strictly confined to men of substance. Each elector must pay direct annual taxes to the amount of yen 15. On this basis the first electoral rolls bore some half-million names, that is, one elector in every eighty of the population; and these electors, being all more or less men of standing in their several localities, might naturally have been supposed to Of the three hundred members in the House, it was found that the politics of at least one-third were practically colorless. These members formed small ephemeral coteries and cliques, which down to the present have been in a perennial state of disintegration and recombination. But nearly one-half of the House openly avowed allegiance to two powerful and well-compacted Opposition parties. To understand the character and position of these parties it is necessary to hark back some little way in modern Japanese history. The Revolution of 1868 was mainly accomplished by the efforts of the three associated clans of Sutsuma, Choshiu, and Tosa, ably supported by Hizen. Naturally the chief administrative power in Japan fell into the hands of their leading men. For the first few years these four clans contrived to work harmoniously together. But presently differences arose, and in 1873 there was a decided split. In that year some of the Tosa and Hizen ministers (who had resigned a few months before) sent in a memorial praying for the establishment of a representative assembly in which the popular wishes might be discussed, and complaining that authority lay neither with the |