ABSTRACT
WHEN, in pursuit of my study of the Revolution, I went to see the habitation, and for a brief hour, if so it might be, to invoke and hold high converse with the spirit of the Imperial University of Japan, in the Kanda district of Tokyo, I was set out to inspect the institutional descendant of what, says the Guide-book, was once the ' Place for the Examination of Barbarian Writings/ This was the style of the Imperial University of Japan a little over thirty years ago, and the style, by all authentic accounts, was accurately descriptive of the function. In pre-Revolution days-fifty years ago and less-the Japanese student who looked into a European text-book risked his neck. Quite often, alas, the risk became fact, so that the Revolution, no doubt, lost many a young recruit who had a marshaTs baton in his knapsack and never knew it. Then the pre-Revolution Government, which was not the Mikado's, constituted a l Place for the Examination of Barbarian Writings/ meaning chiefly a bureau for the dilution or devitalisation of the dangerous truths dangerously set forth in the writings of the leading savages of Europe-as J. S. Mill, Hegel, Comte.
