and by Japanese, that Kobe will become the chief port of foreign trade, because Osaka is able to attract to herself the best business talent of the country. At present the foreign import and export trade of Osaka represents about $120,000,000 a year; and its inland and coasting trade are immense. Almost everything which everybody wants is made in Osaka; and there are few comfortable Japanese homes in any part of the empire to the furnishing of which Osaka industry has not contributed something. This was probably the case long before Tokyo existed. There survives an ancient song of which the burden runs,--"Every day to Osaka come a thousand ships." Junks only, in the time when the song was written; steamers also to-day, and deep-sea travelers of all rigs. Along the wharves you can ride for miles by a seemingly endless array of masts and funnels,--though the great Trans-Pacific liners and European mail-steamers draw too much water to enter the harbor, and receive their Osaka freight at Kobe. But the energetic city, which has its own steamship companies, now proposes to improve its port, at a cost of $16,000,000. An

Osaka with a population of two millions, and a foreign trade of at least 9300,000,000 a year, is not a dream impossible to realize in the next half century. I need scarcely say that Osaka is the centre of the great trade-guilds,[1] and the headquarters of those cotton-spinning companies whose mills, kept running with a single shift twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, turn out double the quantity of yarn per spindle that English mills turn out, and from thirty to forty per cent. more than the mills of Bombay.

Every great city in the world is believed to give a special character to its inhabitants; and in Japan the man of Osaka is said to be recognizable almost at sight. I think it can be said that the character of the man of the capital is less marked than that of the man of Osaka,--as in America the man of Chicago is more quickly recognized than the New Yorker or Bostonian. He has a certain quickness of perception, ready energy, and general air of being "well up to date," or even a little in advance of it, which represent the result

[1. There are upwards of four hundred commercial companies in Osaka.]