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admitting his tenderness to her. Forthwith the bridegroom is charged with cruelly maltreating her. If, happily, it is found afterwards that the newly-married couple are really as happy as can be, it is the turn of the wife to be charged with telling a falsehood. Such is the unregenerate politeness of these benighted heathens. You ask your Japanese friends in the very depths of affliction what ails them, and in reply you get a smile and the answer, ‘Nothing’; for why should they disturb the peace and serenity of their friends with their sorrows as long as they can bear them themselves? Such an answer you may call a lie—a conventional lie, at least, or, more fitly, perhaps, a lie of pride; nevertheless, is it not less blameworthy and more Christian than pouring into your neighbour’s ears all the woes which may constitute the truest facts of your life? No honest hater of cant will deny the truth as stated by George Eliot. ‘We mortals, men and women,’ says she, ‘devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” ‘Pride helps us,’ she continues, ‘and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges to hide our own hurts, not to hurt others.’

Veracity, far from being neglected, formed an important item in the category of knightly virtues. Truth-telling is not always recommended in military life. Strategy is not outspoken honesty. Consider what Lycurgus taught. Honesty is not easily born or bred in camps; rather is it a product of markets and workshops. When Mr. Kidd so exuberantly dilates on the superiority of Western civilization as being mainly due to such a democratic and plain, everyday virtue as honesty and the like, he mistakes effect largely for cause. It requires no flight of imagination or depth of cogitation to discover in industrial dealings that ‘honesty is the best policy,’ whereas veracity, as known in martial ethics, attains a higher and deeper and consequently rarer form, which Lecky calls the philosophical, as distinct from the political or industrial.

The mercantile calling was as far removed from Bushido as the north is from the south. To a Samurai, trade and commerce were small concerns to which it was derogatory to his dignity to pay any attention; hence the effect of Bushido upon the early days of our commerce was not appreciable. This was naturally followed by a low moral tone in the industrial classes. One vulnerable point of Bushido, which it shares with all class morality, is that it meted out honour in unequal degrees to the various vocations of society—most of all to the Samurai, then to the tillers of the soil, to mechanics, and least of all to merchants. The last-named being considered by the rest as the least honourable, naturally they adjusted their moral tone