It would take many lectures to do anything like justice to the important subject on which I am privileged to address you on this occasion. All that I can hope to do in twenty minutes is to touch briefly only upon a few of the more salient features of the system of government as it now exists in Japan.

Japan has been under a constitutional system since 1890, and in view of the struggles that are now going on for political development along a similar line in countries claiming a more or less close relationship with us in race or religion, in language or history, Japan's experience in parliamentary government assumes added interest and value. Turkey and China, and even Persia with which our connection is only remote and historical, can certainly derive some useful lessons from the history of constitutional struggles in Japan during the past twenty years.

In order to understand the political condition of China it will be necessary to know something of the persons and forces that brought it about.

In 1898 the late Emperor Kuang Hsü, inspired by the study of a New Testament, sent to the Empress Dowager by the Christian women of China, and by the study of all the books translated out of European languages into the Chinese, sent to him by the writer and others, began issuing a remarkable series of reform edicts, ordering the establishment of boards of railroads, of mines, of education, etc., and dismissing various conservative officials, and disbanding various useless boards that were an encumberance to the government.