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modern Japan is itself the fruit of the teachings of Bushido. The world admits that Japan, from being a nonenity in the politics of the world, has in the brief space of thirty years raised herself into the position of a first-class Power. The explanation of this seeming miracle has been attempted from various standpoints; but those who are not acquainted with the psychology of our race and with the precepts of Knighthood have despaired of finding an adequate theory, and have summarily attributed what is really no miracle at all to an apish mimicry. It is true that in a sense we certainly possess imitativeness. What progressive nation has not possessed and made use of it? Just think of how little Greek culture has originated on Hellenic soil. Of the Romans at their best, who does not know that they imitated most freely from Greece? How much of Spanish glory and grandeur at their zenith was of Moorish origin? I need not multiply examples. It seems to me that the most original—that is, the least imitative people—are the Chinese, and we see where their originality has led them. Imitation is educative, and education itself is, in the main, imitation. Wallace, and after him many other zoologists, have taught us what a rôle imitation and mimicry play in the preservation of life in nature. We shudder to think what might have been our fate, in this cannibalistic age of nations had we been always consistently original. Imitation has certainly been a means of our salvation.

But imitation is a term of wide significance, which may mean a blind aping such as is the frequent theme in ‘Æsop’s Fables,’ or it may mean an educative principle, a conscious following of a pattern selected with discretion and foresight. In this last instance imitation implies something more; it takes for granted a power of selecting and of acting accordingly. Such a power was Bushido, a teaching which, like its symbol, the cherry-blossom, was born and nurtured in the soil of our Island Realm. It breathed into our nostrils the breath of life, the Yamato-Damashii, the soul of Japan. Well has sung that ancient poet:

And the popular ballad responded ‘as among flowers the Sakura (cherry) is queen, so among men the Samurai is lord.’

But the Samurai is no more, and Bushido will follow in his steps; as his pride is swallowed up in the wide glory of an enlightened populace, so will the teachings of Bushido be merged into a larger, higher code of morals. Whatever