COURAGE, THE SPIRIT OF DARING AND BEARING,

to the consideration of which we shall now return.  Courage was scarcely deemed worthy to be counted among virtues, unless it was exercised in the cause of Righteousness.  In his “Analects” Confucius defines Courage by explaining, as is often his wont, what its negative is.  “Perceiving what is right,” he says, “and doing it not, argues lack of courage.”  Put this epigram into a positive statement, and it runs, “Courage is doing what is right.”  To run all kinds of hazards, to jeopardize one’s self, to rush into the jaws of death—­these are too often identified with Valor, and in the profession of arms such rashness of conduct—­what Shakespeare calls, “valor misbegot”—­is unjustly applauded; but not so in the Precepts of Knighthood.  Death for a cause unworthy of dying for, was called a “dog’s death.”  “To rush into the thick of battle and to be slain in it,” says a Prince of Mito, “is easy enough, and the merest churl is equal to the task; but,” he continues, “it is true courage to live when it is right to live, and to die only when it is right to die,” and yet the Prince had not even heard of the name of Plato, who defines courage as “the knowledge of things that a man should fear and that he should not fear.”  A distinction which is made in the West between moral and physical courage has long been recognized among us.  What samurai youth has not heard of “Great Valor” and the “Valor of a Villein?”

Valor, Fortitude, Bravery, Fearlessness, Courage, being the qualities of soul which appeal most easily to juvenile minds, and which can be trained by exercise and example, were, so to speak, the most popular virtues, early emulated among the youth.  Stories of military exploits were repeated almost before boys left their mother’s breast.  Does a little booby cry for any ache?  The mother scolds him in this fashion:  “What a coward to cry for a trifling pain!  What will you do when your arm is cut off in battle?  What when you are called upon to commit harakiri?” We all know the pathetic fortitude of a famished little boy-prince of Sendai, who in the drama is made to say to his little page, “Seest thou those tiny sparrows in the nest, how their yellow bills are opened wide, and now see! there comes their mother with worms to feed them.  How eagerly and happily the little ones eat! but for a samurai, when his stomach is empty, it is a disgrace to feel hunger.”  Anecdotes of fortitude and bravery abound in nursery tales, though stories of this kind are not by any means the only method of early imbuing the spirit with daring and fearlessness.  Parents, with sternness sometimes verging on cruelty, set their children to tasks that called forth all the pluck that was in them.  “Bears hurl their cubs down the gorge,” they said.  Samurai’s sons were let down the steep valleys of hardship, and spurred to Sisyphus-like tasks.  Occasional deprivation of food or exposure