The Japanese Diet has made its first use of the power secured to it under the new constitution by selecting Mr Tetsu Katayama as Prime Minister. On Saturday, May 24th, he was formally invested in office by the Emperor and he had a 30-minute conference with General MacArthur. In a wireless address he appealed to the Japanese people for their help in the task of rebuilding the country. What most Japanese—rulers and ruled alike—desired, has more or less become a fact. They can now reconstruct their national life in their own way. MacArthur’s administration has partly come to an end. Now that we have arrived at this milestone in Japanese history, we may survey the hundred years of American-Japanese relations.

Twice in the course of history America has forcibly opened Japan to the world and has brought her into peaceful intercourse with other nations. Twice she has made the opportunity of exerting a tremendous influence on the history and development of the Japanese Empire and the Japanese people.

The first occasion was after her more than two centuries’ long seclusion, and was brought about through the mission of Commodore Matthew Galbraith Perry.

On 24th November, 1852, he sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, in the steam frigate Mississippi. His squadron was assembled in Shanghai, and on 8th July, 1853, he entered the Bay of Yedo with four ships of war. The Japanese were not completely unprepared for his arrival, for in 1844 William II, King of Holland, had addressed a letter to the Shogun warning him of the impossibility of maintaining any longer the policy of seclusion.

That the majority of American colleges, even those started under strongly Christian auspices, have become secularized with amazing rapidity—within the last fifty or sixty years— is an obvious fact to be deplored or applauded according to the point of view. For the natural sciences which fought against the domination of theology secularization is, of course, a victory and one so complete that not only does religion not dominate, it is not accorded equality. This is the more striking in the highly endowed schools of the Atlantic seaboard because they were founded as theological seminaries, Harvard to ‘supply the spiritual needs of the colonies’, Yale as a Calvinist stronghold when Harvard became Unitarian, Amherst to prepare ‘poor boys to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ’. Until 1800 all of the Fellows of the governing body of Harvard were clergymen; after 1884 no ministers were included. In 1800 the Professor of Divinity at Yale, Dr Wright, was also president of the college; by 1900 such a combination had become unthinkable.

The women’s colleges have a similar history. It is interesting to trace the change in religion at Mt Holyoke, for example, from the dogmatic Calvinism of Mary Lyon (which included a belief in total depravity) to the present day Universalism, a religion broad enough, according to the address given in 1937 by the retiring secretary of the Y.W.C.A., to include Catholic, Protestant and Jew in the worship of the one God, Father of all.

As the theological faculties declined in dignity and influence the scientific faculties increased.

Don Salvador de Madariaga’s latest work deserves an extensive review, not only because of the importance of its subject, but because its distinguished author justly holds a position of authority among the English public as an interpreter of his country’s history and civilization.

Perhaps none of the great movements of history has been more consistently misrepresented than the Spanish conquest and colonization of America. No culture has suffered more from the ‘whig interpretation of history’ than that of Spain. For at least two centuries there existed what seemed to many Spaniards a conspiracy to belittle and distort the contribution of their country to human civilization. Of late years this tendency has been reversed, and the ‘revaluation’ of Spain’s past, in which English and North-American scholars have played a prominent part, has swept away a great deal of ignorant prejudice. As regards Spanish America in particular, there have been published in both the Americas and in Spain a large number of careful historical studies which make such prejudice no longer excusable. Most of these works will, however, be unknown to the general reader in England, and there is therefore need of a re-presentation and summing-up of the facts.

So did I consider myself after the 853 pages in which Lord Russell apparently sets himself to the task of diminishing all the most valuable things of our European heritage. I wanted to pass the book by with a shrug, but the editor wanted a review. So I wrote angrily, but of course anger defeated itself. I cried the editor mercy, but he had old-fashioned ideas of justice and insisted on a review. Then I happened, to read Bishop Berkeley, and in his contributions to the Guardian and in Alciphron I found a curiously familiar figure. Whose was it? ‘Poland's? Voltaire's? Russell’s? Why, yes, it was Russell himself. Russell down to the ground. Not the formidable Russell, Russell the brilliant logician, but Russell the iconoclast, I had almost said the septuagenarian adolescent, Russell the minute philosopher.

Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style’. As usual Swift cuts through the jungle of theory and finds the fact. It would be interesting to know whether the ‘Young Clergyman’ to whom he wrote benefited by the definition. Certainly clerical English is one of the most chronic of occupational diseases; the fear that, in Sydney Smith’s phrase, the intellect may be ‘improperly exposed’ leads to the swaddling bands of rhetoric and the safe generalisation. Philosophers often fare little better; and the scholarship of yesterday lies mouldering in a hundred libraries, too often unread because it is unreadable.

‘Style’ is confined by the critics to the work of the conscious artist, for whom words are tools to be chosen, sharpened, used. The scholar, understandably contemptuous of the self-important claims of the professional writer, addresses himself to those who want to learn. And learning is never easy. Yet the business of communication has its grace; and a Locke, a Hume, a Macaulay, a Newman survive in a double immortality. Or, more strictly, in them the idea and its expression are matched.

Stilus brevis, grata facundia, celsa, clara, firma sententia. One does not look for literary judgments in a breviary responsory. But this liturgical praise of St Thomas as a master of languages sums up, with something of St Thomas’s own gracious economy of speech, that union of thought and its expression which it should be any writer’s aim to reach. The identification of style with the decorative tricks of a Pater or a George Moore has confused an issue which is simple.