Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/48

the Salisbury-Chamberlain party who has been called upon to vote successive bounties or remission of taxes to landed proprietors and clerical tithe-payers is guilty of somewhat similar acts, with this trifling difference: that instead of rewarding his supporters with money from his own purse, he draws upon the State treasury. It would not be surprising if Japanese politicians were more openly corrupt than our own, for most of them take American politics as the nearest and most friendly school of democracy a school where self-seeking is avowedly the first duty of a public man, and where the prizes fall to the cleverest manipulator or servitor of plutocratic trusts. But, as a matter of fact, neither Tammany nor Panama is yet transplanted to the banks of Sumida-gawa. The laws aimed at electoral bribery are stringent and frequently enforced. Accusations of corruption are invariably followed by official inquiry. It is evident, then, that if the offender be sometimes clever enough to evade discovery, at least public opinion is neither cynical nor depraved. A stronger negative argument is furnished by the fact that the Liberals and Progressives (as the two anti-ministerial parties were called until the fusion in 1898), who had been excluded until that year from office, though constituting on more than one occasion a majority in the Lower House of the Diet, did not accuse the Ministers who launched Japan on the sea of parliamentary government of either misgovernment or dishonest finance. Nepotism was the sum and substance of their complaint. The Chōshi men monopolised the chief posts in the railway department, the Satsuma men held control of army and navy: in a word, the ascendency of the pre-revolutionary clans survived the revolution. But, when their own turn came in the summer of 1898