Commerce, therefore, in feudal Japan did not reach that degree of development which it would have attained under freer conditions.  The obloquy attached to the calling naturally brought within its pale such as cared little for social repute.  “Call one a thief and he will steal:”  put a stigma on a calling and its followers adjust their morals to it, for it is natural that “the normal conscience,” as Hugh Black says, “rises to the demands made on it, and easily falls to the limit of the standard expected from it.”  It is unnecessary to add that no business, commercial or otherwise, can be transacted without a code of morals.  Our merchants of the feudal period had one among themselves, without which they could never have developed, as they did, such fundamental mercantile institutions as the guild, the bank, the bourse, insurance, checks, bills of exchange, etc.; but in their relations with people outside their vocation, the tradesmen lived too true to the reputation of their order.

This being the case, when the country was opened to foreign trade, only the most adventurous and unscrupulous rushed to the ports, while the respectable business houses declined for some time the repeated requests of the authorities to establish branch houses.  Was Bushido powerless to stay the current of commercial dishonor?  Let us see.

Those who are well acquainted with our history will remember that only a few years after our treaty ports were opened to foreign trade, feudalism was abolished, and when with it the samurai’s fiefs were taken and bonds issued to them in compensation, they were given liberty to invest them in mercantile transactions.  Now you may ask, “Why could they not bring their much boasted veracity into their new business relations and so reform the old abuses?” Those who had eyes to see could not weep enough, those who had hearts to feel could not sympathize enough, with the fate of many a noble and honest samurai who signally and irrevocably failed in his new and unfamiliar field of trade and industry, through sheer lack of shrewdness in coping with his artful plebeian rival.  When we know that eighty per cent. of the business houses fail in so industrial a country as America, is it any wonder that scarcely one among a hundred samurai who went into trade could succeed in his new vocation?  It will be long before it will be recognized how many fortunes were wrecked in the attempt to apply Bushido ethics to business methods; but it was soon patent to every observing mind that the ways of wealth were not the ways of honor.  In what respects, then, were they different?

Of the three incentives to Veracity that Lecky enumerates, viz:  the industrial, the political, and the philosophical, the first was altogether lacking in Bushido.  As to the second, it could develop little in a political community under a feudal system.  It is in its philosophical, and as Lecky says, in its highest aspect, that Honesty attained elevated rank in our catalogue of virtues.  With all my sincere regard for the high commercial integrity of the Anglo-Saxon race, when I ask for the ultimate ground, I am told that “Honesty is the best policy,” that it pays to be honest.  Is not this virtue, then, its own reward?  If it is followed because it brings in more cash than falsehood, I am afraid Bushido would rather indulge in lies!