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I am far from having exhausted the subject of filial duties. It is in itself a large theme, and if we were to follow it in all its ramifications, such as the power and responsibility of parents, the worship of ancestors, the constitution of the family, the home education of youths, the place of a mother in the household, it would lead me into the regions of jurisprudence and sociology above my knowledge. Lack of time is my chief excuse for curtailing my discourse. This is, however, the right place to describe in a few words the position of woman, since it was chiefly as a mother that she received our homage. In no respect does our Chivalry differ more widely from the European than in its attitude toward the weaker sex. ‘In Europe gallantry,’ says St. Palaye, ‘is, as it were, the soul of society.’ The so-called gai sabreur—gay science of war and gallantry—was studied and exalted into laws more imperious than those of military honour. And what did it amount to? We see Gibbon blush as he alludes to it; we hear Hallam call it ‘illicit love’; Freeman and Green use terms even more severe. Still, there was a grain of truth in it. Were it not for these, where would the ladies of Christendom have been? Cornish repeats over and over again that courtesy to women was not a feature of European Chivalry, but that it was learned from the Saracens. We on our part had no Saracens to teach us; the Chinese sages and Buddhist monks gave us only depreciatory notions of womankind. It is a matter of constant surprise to me that, with all their great influence, Confucianism and Buddhism did not degrade our women’s social position. Whatever gallantry we had was our own, and this was due first of all to the teaching of manliness which enjoined upon the knights to be clement to the weak; it was due, in the next place, to the teaching of reverence for parents, making sacred the person of women as actual or potential mothers. I am neither so blind nor so partial as to assert that among the Samurai there existed no gaity or lax frivolity, no love of adventure; but these were side-issues, never forming part of the precepts of knighthood, as gai sabreur did of European Chivalry. Nothing is more erroneous than to regard the character of Samurai women as anything like that of the geisha type; it was, indeed, the very contrast between them that was the raison d’être of the latter; for the former was a sedate and even stern, earnest, ‘home-made body,’ with little tact for entertaining and much less for amusing, better versed in ancient poems than in the newest songs, more deft with swords and spears than with guitars and samisen. Plutarch tells us that the ambition of a Spartan woman was to be the wife of a great man, and the mother of illustrious sons. Bushido set no lower ideal before our maidens; their whole