better than his crown, that it was above his sceptered sway.  How often both Confucius and Mencius repeat the highest requirement of a ruler of men to consist in benevolence.  Confucius would say, “Let but a prince cultivate virtue, people will flock to him; with people will come to him lands; lands will bring forth for him wealth; wealth will give him the benefit of right uses.  Virtue is the root, and wealth an outcome.”  Again, “Never has there been a case of a sovereign loving benevolence, and the people not loving righteousness,” Mencius follows close at his heels and says, “Instances are on record where individuals attained to supreme power in a single state, without benevolence, but never have I heard of a whole empire falling into the hands of one who lacked this virtue.”  Also,—­“It is impossible that any one should become ruler of the people to whom they have not yielded the subjection of their hearts.”  Both defined this indispensable requirement in a ruler by saying, “Benevolence—­Benevolence is Man.”  Under the regime of feudalism, which could easily be perverted into militarism, it was to Benevolence that we owed our deliverance from despotism of the worst kind.  An utter surrender of “life and limb” on the part of the governed would have left nothing for the governing but self-will, and this has for its natural consequence the growth of that absolutism so often called “oriental despotism,”—­as though there were no despots of occidental history!

Let it be far from me to uphold despotism of any sort; but it is a mistake to identify feudalism with it.  When Frederick the Great wrote that “Kings are the first servants of the State,” jurists thought rightly that a new era was reached in the development of freedom.  Strangely coinciding in time, in the backwoods of North-western Japan, Yozan of Yonezawa made exactly the same declaration, showing that feudalism was not all tyranny and oppression.  A feudal prince, although unmindful of owing reciprocal obligations to his vassals, felt a higher sense of responsibility to his ancestors and to Heaven.  He was a father to his subjects, whom Heaven entrusted to his care.  In a sense not usually assigned to the term, Bushido accepted and corroborated paternal government—­paternal also as opposed to the less interested avuncular government (Uncle Sam’s, to wit!).  The difference between a despotic and a paternal government lies in this, that in the one the people obey reluctantly, while in the other they do so with “that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of exalted freedom."[8] The old saying is not entirely false which called the king of England the “king of devils, because of his subjects’ often insurrections against, and depositions of, their princes,” and which made the French monarch the “king of asses, because of their infinite taxes and Impositions,” but which gave the title of “the king of men” to the sovereign of Spain “because of his subjects’ willing obedience.”  But enough!—­