FORE:"In the administration of justice," Doctor Bronson continued, "Japan has made great progress in the past few years. Formerly nearly all trials were conducted with torture, and sometimes the witnesses were tortured as well as the accused. The instruments in use were the refinement of cruelty: heavy weights were piled on the body of a prisoner; he was placed in a caldron of water, and a fire was lighted beneath which slowly brought the water to the boiling-point; he was cut with knives in a variety of ways that indicated great ingenuity on the part of the torturers; in fact, he was put to a great deal of pain such as we know nothing about. Under the old system the only persons at a trial were the prisoner, the torturer, the secretary, and the judge; at present the trials are generally open, and the accused has the benefit of counsel to defend him, as in our own courts. Torture has been formally abolished, though it is asserted that it is sometimes employed in cases of treason or other high crimes. Law-schools have been established, reform codes of law have been made, and certainly there is a manifest disposition on the part of the government to give the best system of justice to the people that can be found. Japan is endeavoring to take a place among the nations of the world, and show that she is no longer a barbarian land. The United States have been the foremost to acknowledge her right to such a place, but their action has not been seconded by England and other European countries. It will doubtless come in time, and every year sees some additional step gained in the proper direction.He sat there, alone in the darkening room, doing nothing as far as definite effort went, and yet conscious of an intense internal activity in just looking at the myriads of images that this magic lantern of the mind presented to him. Now for a little it seemed to him that he contemplated a series of pictures that concerned the life which had once been his, and was now finished and rolled up, done with for ever. Now again for a little it seemed that all that was thus presented to him was the life that was going to be his, until for him all life was over. Alice would always be sewing slippers, his wife would always be ordering a bit of salmon, he would always be sitting in an empty office. For a few weeks there had passed across those eternal reiterations somebody whose very face he could not now recall, and when he tried to imagine her, he could see nothing but a blank, a black strip where words had been erased. To-morrow by this time he would know which of those two aspects was the true one: either the salmon and the slippers and this lonely meditation would be his no longer, or they would be all that he could call his. He felt, too, that it was already settled which it was to be: fate had already written in the inexorable book, and had closed it again. To-morrow the page would be shown him, he would read what was inscribed there. No effort on his part, no imposition of his will, no power of his to organise and build up would alter it. Though{304} the crisis was yet to come, its issue was already determined.
