Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/260

(samurai) laid aside his political hatred,—which he could easily do as it was an affair of the head rather than of the heart,—the whole nation, to the bewilderment of the world, was found to be an unit in its amicable mood towards foreigners. Gradually, however, a change began to be observ-able. Japanese frequenting the foreign settle-ments, or living sufficiently near them to derive impressions of the stranger from actual contact with him, mistook for innate boorishness his com-parative indifference to forms and ceremonies, or erroneously accepted as an indication of his gene-ral character the violences and excesses perpetrated too frequently by dissolute representatives of his race. On the other hand, the foreigner misinter-preted much that he saw in Japan. Habits and acts which in the eyes of the Japanese had the sanction of nature and common sense, were con-strued by the foreigner as evidences of the demoralised condition they would necessarily accompany in his own country, and, his treatment of the people being governed by this false esti-mate of their morals, they, in turn, saw in his license of speech and demeanour an index of depravity. Thus each painted for himself a mis-leading portrait of the other, and it resulted that in regions where direct intercourse prompted these erring conceptions, the foreigner, already masterful and intolerant of everything Oriental, became either offensively familiar or contemptu-ously exclusive, which treatment the lower orders