Thus the
patriotism of Yoshida took a form which may be said to have
defeated itself: he had it upon him to keep out these all-
powerful foreigners, whom it is now one of his chief merits
to have helped to introduce; but a man who follows his own
virtuous heart will be always found in the end to have been
fighting for the best. One thing leads naturally to another
in an awakened mind, and that with an upward progress from
effect to cause. The power and knowledge of these foreigners
were things inseparable; by envying them their military
strength, Yoshida came to envy them their culture; from the
desire to equal them in the first, sprang his desire to share
with them in the second; and thus he is found treating in the
same book of a new scheme to strengthen the defences of Kioto
and of the establishment, in the same city, of a university
of foreign teachers. He hoped, perhaps, to get the good of
other lands without their evil; to enable Japan to profit by
the knowledge of the barbarians, and still keep her inviolate
with her own arts and virtues. But whatever was the precise
nature of his hope, the means by which it was to be
accomplished were both difficult and obvious. Some one with
eyes and understanding must break through the official
cordon, escape into the new world, and study this other
civilisation on the spot.
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