Formerly no woman was allowed to climb above the eighth.  Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, of the University of Tokyo, has a foot-note in his Things Japanese (274) in which he relates that in the introduction to his translation of the Kojiki he had drawn attention to the inferior place held by women in ancient as in modern Japan.  Some years afterward six of the chief literati of the old school translated this introduction into Japanese.  They patted the author on the head for many things, but when they reached the observation anent the subjection of women, their wrath exploded: 

“The subordination of women to men,” so ran their commentary, “is an extremely correct custom.  To think the contrary is to harbor European prejudice....  For the man to take precedence over the woman is the grand law of heaven and earth.  To ignore this, and to talk of the contrary as barbarous, is absurd.”

The way in which these kind, gentle, and pretty women are treated by the men, Chamberlain says on another page,

“has hitherto been such as might cause a pang to any generous European heart....  At the present moment the greatest duchess or marchioness in the land is still her husband’s drudge.  She fetches and carries for him, bows down humbly in the hall when my lord sallies forth on his walks abroad, waits upon him at meals, may be divorced at his good pleasure.”

This testimony regarding a nation which in some things—­especially aesthetic culture and general courteousness—­surpasses Europe and America, is of special value, as it shows that love, based on sympathy with women’s joys and sorrows, and adoration of their peculiar qualities, is everywhere the last flower of civilization, and not, as the sentimentalists claim, the first.  If even the advanced Japanese are unable to feel romantic love—­for you cannot adore what you egotistically look down on—­it is absurd to look for it among barbarians and savages, such as the Fuegians, who, in times of necessity, eat their old women, or the Australians, among whom not many women are allowed to die a natural death, “they being generally despatched ere they become old and emaciated, that so much good food may not be lost."[27]

There are some apparent exceptions to the universal contempt for females even among cannibals.  Thus it is known that the Peruvian Casibos never eat women.  It is natural to jump to the conclusion that this is due to respect for the female sex.  It is, however, as Tschudi shows, assignable to exactly the opposite feeling: 

“All the South American Indians, who still remain under the influence of sorcery and empiricism, consider women in the light of impure and evil beings, and calculated to injure them.  Among a few of the less rude nations this aversion is apparent in domestic life, in a certain unconquerable contempt of females.  With the anthropophagi the feeling extends, fortunately, to their flesh,