This article appeared in the Kokumin Shimbun on April 3, 1892.
………
Xun Qing said: “The sentiments of thousands or tens of thousands are the same as the sentiments of a single individual; the beginning of heaven and earth is the present moment; the Way of the hundred ancient kings is the Way of the kings who follow.” These are solid assertions and supreme truths that cannot be shaken. If one places oneself in that very setting and that very time, the past becomes the present, and history becomes living action. By doing so, one examines Ieyasu’s strategies and Yoshimune’s governance; Ieyasu is resurrected, and Yoshimune comes to life. It is as if I were living alongside Ieyasu and Yoshimune, grasping their hands and engaging in deep discourse.
To divide the past and the present into two distinct realms, treating them as utterly different entities, akin to Heaven and Hell, with separate laws and separate rulers, or as darkness differs from light, is to possess a vision that extends no further than the immediate foreground. Whether water freezes, flows, or boils, it remains water. From Adam to Bismarck, and from the sage-kings Yao and Shun to Ito Hirobumi, despite differences across eras, levels of civilization, and degrees of wisdom, the fundamental nature of humanity remains one and the same. Therefore, the laws and the governing authorities that shape human nature must also be one and the same.
Birds lay an egg in a nest; the nineteenth century rests in the cradle of the past. Trace a river upstream and you reach the spring; trace it downstream and you reach the sea. The nineteenth century was the child of the eighteenth and the mother of the twentieth. A single lineage connects mother and child, just as a single political philosophy connects successive centuries. The ‘gunken’ system concentrates power at the center, while the ‘hoken’ system distributes power to the localities. The ideal political system lies in a balance between the two, a mean achieved in China.
From the perspective of political science, the constitutional systems of today, such as local self-government, judicial independence, and royal prerogatives, serve to divide parliamentary power and prevent the onset of so-called ‘parliamentary despotism’; this mechanism relies fundamentally on the political principles of the distribution and balancing of power. Does this not mean that the proposal for maintaining peace and order, “Nothing surpasses establishing various states and distributing power among them” advanced by the thinker Jia Yi stems from the same political philosophy as Montesquieu’s theory of the separation of powers?
It is not by mere chance that I make this statement. I lament those who discuss law and politics by erecting sectarian barriers, labeling themselves as belonging to the English, German, or French schools of thought. To know the child is to know the parent; to see the elder sister is to discern the younger; to clearly grasp the part is to illuminate the whole. If one truly understands the laws and government of a single nation, one can thereby discern the laws and government of the world. For humanity is one, and the science of politics is one. Why, then, engage in petty, divisive squabbles?
What exists ‘now’ is what existed in the ‘past’; what appears ‘there’ appears ‘here’ as well. If one realizes that past and present are one, and that here and there are one, then the English Law is the Buddha-Dharma, and the Buddha-Dharma is the English Law. Without such realization, one knows neither the Buddha-Dharma nor the English Law.
That which does not circulate is not currency; that which cannot be applied is not scholarship. One who fails to perceive the principles of the Imperial Constitution within the Taihō Code cannot be said to have truly mastered that code. A person who reads history but fails to glean a few truths applicable to the present day is no better off, even after finishing the book, than one who never read it at all. If a person claims, “I cannot understand French law because I studied English law”, or “I cannot understand German law because I studied French law”, then that person has merely scratched the surface of legal studies; they cannot be said to have truly mastered the law.
Was Cromwell destined to be born only in 17th-century England? Whenever the times demand a figure like him, he will inevitably emerge. ‘Magna Carta’. Was it destined to be received solely from the hands of King John? Whenever the need arises for a guarantee of freedom of speech, it can be secured from someone, no matter who, or what the time.
The history of all nations converges in the Japan of today. The present is no different from the past; the past was no different from the present. To arbitrarily divide them into ‘here’ and ‘there’, or ‘past’ and ‘present’, is a meaningless distinction.
