According to traditional Indian belief and practice every creature has a function (vrata) which he fulfills in the universe. What function did the artist or craftsman fulfill in society, and in that other invisible part of the universe, which he was able to convey by his work to those around him and to posterity?

The distinction often made in the West between artist and craftsman did not affect India. The practitioner of one of the sixty-four recognized branches of art (kala), which provided channels for every possible kind of creative endowment to be trained and employed, fulfilled his calling in the best way possible to him, and thus carried out his universal task.

Many Japanese rose to political greatness during the turbulent history of modern Japan from the collapse of the Tokugawa regime in 1867 to the recovery of independence in 1952. Such men as Itō, Yamagata, Ōkuma, Konoe, Tōjō, and Yoshida (to name only a few of the more important figures) have occupied in turn the center of the political stage and exerted great influence, for good or ill, on the course of recent Japanese political history.

Throughout the entire period from Meiji to MacArthur Japan, however, one solitary figure stood by the proscenium arch, occasionally entering into the action of the play, but more often serving as a persistent critic of both actors and audience. This stern and durable individual was Ozaki Yukio (1858-1954), whose death at the age of ninety-five removed the oldest veteran of the Japanese Diet, and closed the career of a man who might well be called the political conscience of modern Japan.

The problem of the economic condition of the peasantry in societies in the early stages of an industrial revolution has long been a matter of interest to economic historians, and recently it has been taken up by economists concerned with the contemporary problem of economic development. The prototype has traditionally been the career of the peasantry in England during the period after 1750. The classical description of the fate of this peasantry is well known, a tale of ruthless enclosure, steady increase in landless day laborers, and a persistent decline in the standard of life. The ablest description of this process in the venerable vein can be found in the writings of Arnold Toynbee, Paul Mantoux, and John and Barbara Hammond. Since about 1925, however, the canonical view of the career of the English peasantry has come under serious attack by J. H. Clapham, T. S. Ashton, and J. D. Chambers. In fact, the older view so passionately explored by the Hammonds has been much modified, and a new picture of the impact of the industrial revolution on the peasantry is slowly emerging.

The first decade of the Meiji era, 1868-77, was a period of bewildering experiment in political forms for the nation-state emerging in Japan. The administrative structure of the new central government underwent a kaleidoscopic series of forms ranging from the direct copy of an eighth-century Japanese pattern to a system modelled on the American doctrine of separation of powers. First in Kyoto and later in Tokyo, during the 1870's and 1880's, government departments rapidly divested themselves of ancient nomenclature derived from China and assumed the forms of European administration as the Japanese tried increasingly to demonstrate that they knew how to run a government in western fashion.

One of the important keys to understanding twentieth-century developments in Central Asia—especially in Buriat Mongolia, Outer Mongolia, and Tibet—is an appreciation of the important role played by the Buriat Mongolian intelligentsia. The Buriats, in the words of one of them, " … constituted the cultural avant-garde among the Mongolian tribes, introducing and leading the revolutionary ideas of our time…”

Buriat Mongolia, now an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union, includes in its population less than 300,000 Buriats, roughly one-tenth of the total Mongolian population of the world. From this small group, most of whom were illiterate before 1917, arose a group of intellectuals whose influence extended beyond the borders of their homeland to Outer Mongolia and Tibet, and to the smaller areas of Barga (in Manchuria) and Urianghai (incorporated in 1943 into the USSR as the Tannu Tuva Autonomous Oblast'). This Buriat intelligentsia was particularly influential from about 1900 to 1930; in the thirties most of them were purged—killed or sent to concentration camps.

In a paper that appeared some time ago, I suggested that Chang Ping-lin (1868-1936) spared the Classics by condemning the Throne. K'ang Yu-wei (1858-1927), the intellectual leader of the fin-de-siècle monarchist Reformers, had tied his radical prescriptions for Chinese society and culture to a highly personal reading of old texts, especially the Kung-yang chuan, one of two long-overshadowed alternates to the Tso-chuan as the key to the meaning of the Ch'unch'iu, the Spring and Autumn annals. His exploitation of the Kung-yang chuan, in turn, depended on the discrediting of a whole class of texts to which the Tsochuan belonged, the so-called ku-wen or “ancient-text” Classics, accepted as the orthodox canon since the end of the Later Han dynasty. Unlike the ku-wen Classics, to whose prototypes orthodox Confucian tradition attributed a pre- Ch'in antiquity, the Kung-yang chuan existed only in a Han (hence, chin-wen or “modern-text”) version, allegedly a faithful reconstruction of an early original.