A recent American writer is responsible for this statement, that if you ask an ordinary Japanese which is better, to tell a falsehood or be impolite, he will not hesitate to answer “to tell a falsehood!” Dr. Peery[14] is partly right and partly wrong; right in that an ordinary Japanese, even a samurai, may answer in the way ascribed to him, but wrong in attributing too much weight to the term he translates “falsehood.”  This word (in Japanese uso) is employed to denote anything which is not a truth (makoto) or fact (honto).  Lowell tells us that Wordsworth could not distinguish between truth and fact, and an ordinary Japanese is in this respect as good as Wordsworth.  Ask a Japanese, or even an American of any refinement, to tell you whether he dislikes you or whether he is sick at his stomach, and he will not hesitate long to tell falsehoods and answer, “I like you much,” or, “I am quite well, thank you.”  To sacrifice truth merely for the sake of politeness was regarded as an “empty form” (kyo-rei) and “deception by sweet words,” and was never justified.

[Footnote 14:  Peery, The Gist of Japan, p. 86.]

I own I am speaking now of the Bushido idea of veracity; but it may not be amiss to devote a few words to our commercial integrity, of which I have heard much complaint in foreign books and journals.  A loose business morality has indeed been the worst blot on our national reputation; but before abusing it or hastily condemning the whole race for it, let us calmly study it and we shall be rewarded with consolation for the future.

Of all the great occupations of life, none was farther removed from the profession of arms than commerce.  The merchant was placed lowest in the category of vocations,—­the knight, the tiller of the soil, the mechanic, the merchant.  The samurai derived his income from land and could even indulge, if he had a mind to, in amateur farming; but the counter and abacus were abhorred.  We knew the wisdom of this social arrangement.  Montesquieu has made it clear that the debarring of the nobility from mercantile pursuits was an admirable social policy, in that it prevented wealth from accumulating in the hands of the powerful.  The separation of power and riches kept the distribution of the latter more nearly equable.  Professor Dill, the author of “Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire,” has brought afresh to our mind that one cause of the decadence of the Roman Empire, was the permission given to the nobility to engage in trade, and the consequent monopoly of wealth and power by a minority of the senatorial families.