Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/159

evolution took in the neighbouring Empire of Japan. There exactly the same fourfold division of the people was adopted—gentleman, farmer, artisan, and trader—and exactly the same ideographs were employed in writing these terms. But although the idea originally informing the classification may have been, and probably was, similar in both countries, a double change occurred in China at some period of her history not definitely marked; the "gentleman," ceasing to be identified as a soldier, became a literatus, and the trader, ceasing to be regarded as a kind of general enemy, whose business was to extort undue gains from his fellow-beings, became a respectable, though not perhaps a highly respected, member of society. It would be most interesting to trace the beginnings and the progress of this revolution of ideas, and to discover how and when it came to pass that education inspired contempt for a military career; that military posts were abandoned to men lacking moral endowment for study, and that the dregs of society alone constituted a proper recruiting ground for professional fighters. History, however, offers little clue to these questions. In Japan no such change occurred. There the soldier retained his pride of place; scholarship ranked merely as a polite accomplishment; contempt for pecuniary gain in any shape headed the list of gentlemanlike characteristics, and the tradesman, himself producing nothing and living