NEARLY three hundred years ago, Captain John Saris, visiting Japan in the service of the "Right Honourable Companye, ye marchants of London trading into ye East Indyes," wrote concerning the great city of Osaka (as the name is now transliterated):--"We found Osaca to be a very great towne, as great as London within the walls, with many faire timber bridges of a great height, seruing to passe ouer a riuer there as wide as the Thames at London. Some faire houses

we found there, but not many. It is one of the chiefe sea-ports of all Iapan; hauing a castle in it, maruellous large and strong" . . . What Captain Saris said of the Osaka of the seventeenth century is almost equally true of the Osaka of to-day. It is still a very great city and one of the chief seaports of all Japan; it contains, according to the Occidental idea, "some faire houses;" it has many "faire timber bridges (as well as bridges of steel and stone)--seruing to passe ouer a river as wide as the Thames at London,"--the Yodogawa; and the castle "marvellous large and strong," built by Hideyoshi after the plan of a Chinese fortress of the Han dynasty, still remains something for military engineers to wonder at, in spite of the disappearance of the many-storied towers, and the destruction (in 1868) of the magnificent palace.

Osaka is more than two thousand five hundred years old, and therefore one of the most ancient cities of Japan,--though its present name, a contraction of Oye no Saka, meaning the High Land of the Great River, is believed to date back only to the fifteenth

century, before which time it was called Naniwa. Centuries before Europe knew of the existence of Japan, Osaka was the great financial and commercial centre of the empire; and it is that still. Through all the feudal era, the merchants of Osaka were the bankers and creditors of the Japanese princes: they exchanged the revenues of rice for silver and gold;--they kept in their miles of fireproof warehouses the national stores of cereals, of cotton, and of silk;--and they furnished to great captains the sinews of war. Hideyoshi made Osaka his military capital;--Iyeyasu, jealous and keen, feared the great city, and deemed it necessary to impoverish its capitalists because of their financial power.

The Osaka of 1896, covering a vast area has a population of about 670,000. As to extent and population, it is now only the second city of the empire; but it remains, as Count Okuma remarked in a recent speech, financially, industrially, and commercially superior to Tokyo. Sakai, and Hyogo, and Kobe are really but its outer ports; and the last-named is visibly outgrowing, Yokohama. It is confidently predicted, both by foreigners