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to charge Shakespeare with translating from the Chinese sage when we see him make the Earl of Albany say: ‘When I could not be honest I could not be valiant.’ This Rectitude, or Justice, was considered inseparable from Courage. Rectitude was, indeed, the sole justifying condition for the exercise of Valour. Only the rightness of a cause was determined not by utilitarian argument, but solely by subjective moral judgment. It was the motive, not the end, that imparted justness to conduct. In part, as John Stuart Mill has said, the motive and the object of a moral action are hardly distinguishable. It has always seemed to me that as our thought works only in a straight line, when we treat intellectually of a moral action, we think of the motive as a starting-point of a line which terminates in another point, the object; whereas a complete moral action may be likened to a solid sphere, an orb, in which justice runs from the centre in innumerable radii, and of which the substance is love. For if Rectitude gives form to character, Benevolence imparts quality and tone to it.

Bushido held Benevolence as the crowning attribute of a noble spirit. It taught that it was cowardice to crush a fallen man, that it was manly to help the weak and show sympathy to women and children, that a man is truly a Samurai who feels in his heart pity. Bushido, at its best, even went further than this, if we can trust Bakin as our guide. In his wonderful story of ‘Eight Hounds’ he makes Inui (who represents the virtue of Benevolence) play the part of a good Samaritan by saving the life of his own wounded enemy with medicine and nursing, an act worthy to be inscribed in the records of the Red Cross. I confess I feel a difference, without being able to express it, between Love, as taught by Christ, and Benevolence, upon which Bushido never ceases from insisting. Is it in their intrinsic character? Is it in their degree of intensity? Is it that the one is democratic and the other aristocratic? Is it in the ways of manifestation? Is it that the one is eternally feminine and the other eternally masculine? Or is it that the one is of Heaven, heavenly, and the other of the earth, earthy? I know not how to answer these and other questions arising in quick succession as my pen glides over the sheets; but this I believe—that Bushido, grounding itself in the light that lighteth every man coming into the world, anticipated a more glorious revelation of Love.

But to return. Bushido regarded Benevolence as the master virtue, not only because it masters all other virtues, but because it is the first thing needful if a man would master his fellows; hence Confucius and Mencius were tireless in teaching it to princes and rulers. In fact, that single word to them covered the whole duty of kingship. A few years ago (1897) the German