inaugurated until its proscription in 1637 has already been sufficiently indicated. Soon after the first treaties with America and Europe, eighty Japanese Christians were discovered at Nagasaki. Ten of these were tortured to death, as the old edicts still remained in force. In 1859 missionaries of the American Episcopal Church arrived, and the year after came those great lights of pioneer missionary work in Japan, Hepburn of the Presbyterian Board and Verbeck of the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1873 the Government edicts against Christianity were withdrawn, and for a time there was considerable national inclination toward Christianity. Since that time there have been many fluctuations, depending largely upon Japan's leaning at the time toward or away from the ways of the West. On the whole, progress has been consistent and steady. Never, in all probability, has there been a time when Christianity was more influential in the national life than now. As Marquis Okuma said in 1912: "Although Christianity has enrolled less than 200,000 believers, yet the indirect influence of Christianity has poured into every realm of Japanese life. It has been borne to us on all the currents of European civilization; most of all the English language and literature, so surcharged with Christian ideas, has exerted a wide and deep influence over Japanese thought." The above quotation underestimates the number of Christians. The Russian mission, founded by the truly great missionary, Archbishop Nicolai, claims 33,000 members. The Roman Catholics number about 66,000. The Anglican Missions (Nippon Sei Ko Kuai) report something over 20,000. All other Christian bodies aggregate something under 100,000. Thus the grand total must reach a figure of over 300,000.

On the general subject of missionary work in Asia there is, of course, much to be said by way of criticism. Missions necessarily reflect the weakness as well as the strength of the home churches which are responsible for them. Yet in sober truth no words would be too strong to express the real value of missionary work. Missionaries have been the pioneers of

civilization in hitherto unknown regions of the earth; they have been explorers, geographers, philosophers, tamers of the wild in nature and of the savage in humanity; they have lived as aliens among men with whom they longed to live as brothers and for whom they would have been glad to die; not infrequently they were aliens perforce to men of their own blood and breed; they have esteemed lightly the dangers of persecution and disease, and in loneliness they have strengthened their souls for the performance of duty when duty was hardest; they have been responsible for the upholding of standards which no society around them followed or respected, and which many sometimes of their own kin - mocked and set at naught; they have had wrestlings with their own flesh and blood to maintain purity without being cold, and courage without being rash, and patience without being dilatory; they have had wrestlings also with enemies not of flesh and blood, but with the powers of darkness entrenched within the society in which they lived. Surely, students of the history of Asia who read of the battles. in which Alexander and Jenghiz Khan played their part will have a word of praise for the humbler heroes who sacrificed all, that the East might have the best which the West had received and learned.

CHAPTER XXVII

CONCLUSION

It is hoped that something organic has emerged from the mass of happenings which it has been our task to chronicle. The attempt has been made to tell the story of Asia, not as a mechanical juxtaposition of separate national stories, but rather as the unfolding of great human movements which show a continuous convergence of purpose. These movements are seen to originate for the most part in the central parts of Asia. Compelled by many forces, physical and human, they are seen further to take certain definite directions, east or west or south (rarely north) as the case may be. They carry in their train all manner of consequences, social and political, for the individual, the community, and the race.

In general these movements are from inland toward the coast. All along the fringes of the Asiatic continent we find the frontiersmen of Asiatic civilization. As the advanced wing of their stock, they bear with them not a little of their earliest culture; but we find also that culture developed and enriched by the necessities of adjustment to a new environment. Opposition encountered from the tribes already in possession of the invaded territories acts as a brake in slowing down a movement. This is often merciful, and to the interest of both invaders and invaded. It gives solidity to what might otherwise be nothing but a raid. It gives a chance to the subjugated to absorb culture from their conquerors. It brings government in the wake of conquest. Together with some loss, due to the influence of contact with lower types of civilization or to the debilitating

effect of a different clime, it brings to the newcomers the advantages which opposition under such circumstances commonly begets. There is in particular the gain in political character which the clash of new experiences makes possible. New ideas come with new experience and these ideas become ideals, which the outstanding men of the race embody in literature and religion. And these at last become traditions, which enter into the character of the race.

It is no mere caprice which has selected certain parts of Asia for fuller description than others. It is not always true that the happiest people are those who have no history. For some peoples there was no history because they took no part in the great onward march of men toward the bounds of the waste; since they did not face the great Unknown, they opened up for themselves no new vistas of experience. The coast communities, on the other hand, which stand out so conspicuously in our narrative - China, India, Japan - become the outposts of the Asiatic epic. Here we find the people who gather up and carry with them the interest of all the Way.

It is to be remembered that while one great series of human waves was breaking upon the Eastern shores other waves were rolling on in another direction, seeking more distant outlets beyond the limits of the West. The "grave Tyrian trader" of whom Matthew Arnold writes - he too was an Asiatic. He too represents the story of the Orient, who

Snatch'd his rudder and shook out more sail;
And day and night held on indignantly...
To where the Atlantic raves

Outside the western straits.

With the most adventurous in the van, whole tribes moved across Europe seeking the sea, as certainly as did Xenophon's Ten Thousand on their way to the Euxine. Then in the fifteenth century there came a time when the two great movements, working as it seemed blindly in opposite directions, appeared, like the king's children of the poem, to be

permanently sundered. Europe had now her back to the Orient. Ex oriente lux no longer had meaning for her, except as that light came luridly in the wake of new hordes of Turks and Tatars.

Yet the Atlantic proved too narrow a gulf to remain unbridged. So the new frontiersmen moved on yet another stage of the great trek. As on a beach we see the successive shorelines which the tides have left, so we follow the frontier lines of history westward and westward still across the new continent of America till once again "The sea! The sea!" is the cry. And beyond that sea lies Asia regained.

Then at last, for us and our own day, the two great human tides lap either Pacific shore. Two great expressions of civilization face one another across a vaster gulf than Balboa imagined when he named the Pacific the Gulf of San Miguel. It was no mere geographical approximation. It was a social and political approximation as well. For ideals had become traditions on either side-ideals which, moreover, were no longer to remain strange each to the other. Democracy, with all its risks and responsibilities and all its hopes, is but the expression of this self-conscious approach of Orient and Occident.

Shall the issue be a new marriage of East and West, as superior to the festival at Susa as the ideals of Lincoln and Wilson were superior to those of Alexander? Or shall an intelligent democracy permit the battle lines to be set in array for another Armageddon, which, instead of bringing to pass the triumph of the good, shall become the ultimate holocaust in which all civilization, Eastern and Western, all the historical evolution of all the centuries, must sink into ashes?

Does our necessarily sketchy account of the history of Asia give us any warrant for prophesying? We may certainly do so, not wholly without profit, though with the usual risks. At least our summary places upon us the responsibility for continued study and reflection upon what we study. Only thus can we hope to discern the drift of our own time—if we may