fully alive to the great problems of modern municipal
government and had prepared comprehensive and en-
lightened measures for meeting those problems.

This fact should be made a matter of record here,
because so many American visitors, during a hurried
sojourn in Tokyo, get entirely false notions about the
local situation. Most of them, seeing great thorough-
fares unpaved, high-class residential sections without
sewers, and new suburban areas growing up along narrow
and crooked streets exclaim: "I would like to tell the city
officials how we do things in the United States." As the
visitor is generally a well-to-do person who lives in a
high-grade hotel or a fine residential district at home, he
often assumes, without thinking, that all American citizens
are as well served by modern conveniences as he is himself.
As a matter of fact, in nine cases out of ten, he knows
little or nothing about the history of sanitation and city
planning in the United States. He would be amazed to
learn how recently Baltimore and New Orleans have com-
pleted their sewer systems, how many people in Pitts-
burgh had no sewer service in 1912, or how high the death
rate was in Washington that year. ¹

For the benefit of foreign visitors to Tokyo during
the next few years and of Western students of Oriental
affairs, I deem it an obligation therefore to call attention
to the quality of some of the men who are charged with
important responsibilities in the city. I ought to add also
that the list might be enlarged indefinitely.

At the head of the city stands Viscount Goto who is
regarded by all Japanese as one of the ablest men in the
Empire. He is a Samurai of the North, born in 1857.
He chose medicine for his career and carried on his

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