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enough just to be untarnished: in active life occasions offered themselves which required some compromise, and the story of an ancient Chinese statesman was not forgotten. This nobleman, retiring from public life full of disgust, beguiled his days with angling. One evening, while he was thus occupied, a boat passed by, and a fisherman seated therein thus broke the silence of the sea: ‘Art thou not the illustrious lord of Sanyo? Wherefore this waste of time, when the land is in great need of thy services?’ The nobleman replied: ‘All the world is gone astray; I alone walk straight.’ Hereupon the fisherman took his oar, and beating time on the side of his craft as it floated away, sang: ‘A superior man keeps pace with the world: When the waters of the Soro stream are as pure as crystal, then may he dip the tassels of his coronet; when they are sullied with mud, then shall he wash his sandals therein.” A dangerous doctrine this, I own; still, not unworthy to be pondered over.

The first requisite for a perfect Samurai was, as I have said, ever to keep account with himself. Conscience, called among us by the comprehensive term Kokoro (which may mean mind, spirit, and heart as well), was the only criterion of right and wrong. But we know that conscience is a power of perception, and the whole tenor of Bushido being activity, we were taught the Socratic doctrine—though Socrates was as unknown to us as X rays—that thought and action are one and the same.

Whatever Conscience approves is Rectitude, and whatever enables us to obtain the latter in conformity with the former is Courage. It is only to be expected from the martial character of Bushido that Valour should play an important part. In early youth the Samurai was put to the task of bearing and daring. Boys, and girls also—though naturally to a less extent—were trained in a Lacedemonian fashion to endure privation of all kinds. To go through the snow bare-foot before sunrise to his exercise of fencing or archery; to visit graveyards in the small hours of night; to pass whole nights sitting upright and ready; to undergo severe tests which would strike as barbarous a modern ‘scientific’ pedagogue, were means of education to which every Samurai was subjected. Wholesome, and in many respects useful, as was such a process of steeling the nervous courage of a physical nature, it was not this that Bushido chiefly aimed at. It was Mencius who taught the difference between the valour of villeins and what he calls ‘great (i.e., moral) courage,’ and the man whose stamina lay in the former was given no higher epithet than ‘boor-warrior.’ ‘Courage when it passes beyond proper bounds turns into ferocity.’ Confucius taught so clearly that an act to be brave must first be right that one is almost tempted