TO JOHN ROBERT SEELEY M.A. HON. LL.D. Regius Professor of Modern History Fellow of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF HIS KINDNESS AND IN ADMIRATION OF HIS QUALITIES AS A HISTORIAN BY THE AUTHOR NEW YORK C. PREFACE. I FEEL that some explanation is due when a Japanese ventures to address himself to English readers; my plea is that the matters on which I write are of vital importance to England as well as to Japan. Though I feel that my knowledge of English is so imperfect that many errors of idiom and style and even of grammar must appear in my pages, yet I hope that the courtesy which I have ever experienced in this country will be extended. also to my book. My aim has been twofold: on the one hand, to arouse my own countrymen to a sense of the great part Japan has to play in the coming century; on the other, to call the 1 |