ment of a trade between the Daimio of Bungo and Macao. Seven years later, a young Japanese fugitive sailed on one of the Portuguese traders to Goa, where he became converted to Christianity, returning shortly after to his home, accompanied by some Jesuit fathers, among whom was the celebrated Francis Xavier. They were welcomed with open arms, and Xavier's devoted labours, backed by the pompous ceremonial of the Roman Church, which delighted the impressionable Japanese, brought immense numbers of natives under the standard of the cross within a few years. These converts, in their enthusiasm for the new religion, actually sent an embassy to the Pope in 1585, to assure him of their entire submission to Rome. An enormous ecclesiastical establishment sprang up in Japan, numbering hundreds of churches and hundreds of thousands of converts, while it has been said that the reigning emperor himself leant towards the doctrines preached by the Jesuit fathers.

But, sheltered in the first instance by a feudal lord, one of a coalition of clan-leaders who were struggling against the concentration of power in the hands of the Shogunate, then administered by Taiko Sama, the ablest man and greatest figure in Japanese history, Christianity became at length a political bond between certain rebellious feudatories, and a synonym with treason. The Portuguese clergy too became haughty with increasing success, mimicking the pomp of Rome and claiming

precedence over the native aristocracy, besides introducing the spirit of the Inquisition, a thing wholly repugnant to Japanese ideas of toleration. Christianity, in fine, seemed already threatening to become an imperium in imperio in Japan, when the State determined on its eradication. In 1587 the Jesuits were ordered to quit the country, and the Buddhist clergy, seeing their own wishes seconded by the power of the Shogunate, threw all the weight of their influence with a superstitious people into the scale against the new faith. Persecutions, deportations, and massacres followed, and for the first third of the seventeenth century the history of Christianity in Japan is a long record of bloodshed. Deprived of their leaders, menaced with torture and death, but still faithful to their creed, the Christians at last took up arms, and made a final stand in the stronghold of Simabara, in 1638.

Meanwhile the Dutch, who landed for the first time in Japan in 1600, had been allowed to establish a small factory on the island of Firando, near Nagasaki. They were careful to make the Government understand that their religion had nothing in common with that of the Jesuit fathers, and if, during the persecutions, one of them were asked by a Japanese if he were a Christian, the answer was, "No, I'm a Dutchman.” But they were jealous of the commercial supremacy of the Portuguese and hated their religion, with which, in the person of Spain, they were indeed at deadly strife, and spared

no intrigues against their rivals, to the extent, as some say, of being traitors to the Christian faith itself. Be this as it may, it is certain that the Dutch aided the Japanese in subduing the stubborn remnant of Christians who made their final stand at Simabara, and it was by Dutch guns that the walls of this last stronghold of the cross in Japan were battered to the ground. In the massacre which followed the taking of Simabara, no less than forty thousand victims were slain, and Japanese Christianity perished in a sea of blood. It had grown up in a night, matured in half a century, and was utterly rooted out in less than a hundred years after being first planted in the country.

The Dutch gained little from their treachery towards the religion, loyalty to which had ruined their rivals. They were allowed to occupy the little island of Desima, being strictly confined within its limits, and watched by a special police. Once a year they were obliged to express their contempt for the Christian religion, and, it is said, to spit upon the cross; while they were only allowed to import two ship-loads of merchandise per annum. But the Dutchman knew how to transmute his chains into gold, and small as Desima is, it was big enough to hold some large Dutch fortunes in the seventeenth century.

At Nagasaki the Malacca took in a supply of Kagoshima coal, which looks like excellent fuel. It came alongside in great junks, and was discharged by means

of small straw baskets, passing from hand to hand in a continuous stream, along two lines of natives, among whom were many women and girls. On the other side of the ship, the steam crane was loading cases of dried fish, the machine being cleverly rigged with a snatchblock, so as to make it double-acting, hauling one case from the boat to the deck, while it dropped a second into the hold. It was a characteristic last view of Japan; man versus science; the East against the West. Which will win?

Leaving Nagasaki harbour, one sees, for the first time in Japan, mountains rising directly from the sea, instead of from a plain. At the southern corner of the islands, the low terrace which marks an old sealevel and forms the present shore almost universally elsewhere, disappears; and we take leave, not of a country strange in this respect, as in so many others, to all our former experiences, but of bold, familiarlooking sea-cliffs, against whose feet the great Pacific waves are breaking in sheets of foam.

CHAPTER X.

NEW JAPAN.

November 25-27.

THREE days on board ship, with fine weather overhead and a spanking monsoon astern, was just what we wanted to arrange our ideas of the curious land we had left. The chief interest of Japan for Europeans commences with the year 1853, when the American, Commodore Perry, arrived in the country, demanding the establishment of relations with the United States. This mission, which resulted in the opening of Japan after two hundred and twenty-five years of absolute seclusion, was the beginning of a momentous series of events, including the subversion of the traditional form of Government, the abolition of the feudal system, and the establishment of a so-called Europeanized Government upon its ruins. Neither the history of these occurrences nor the present political position of New Japan can be understood without some reference to Old Japan, while there still remains much that is inexplicable in recent events and great uncertainties in regard to the future of the country.