Many a Shigemori has his heart torn by the conflict between duty and affection.  Indeed neither Shakespeare nor the Old Testament itself contains an adequate rendering of ko, our conception of filial piety, and yet in such conflicts Bushido never wavered in its choice of Loyalty.  Women, too, encouraged their offspring to sacrifice all for the king.  Ever as resolute as Widow Windham and her illustrious consort, the samurai matron stood ready to give up her boys for the cause of Loyalty.

Since Bushido, like Aristotle and some modern sociologists, conceived the state as antedating the individual—­the latter being born into the former as part and parcel thereof—­he must live and die for it or for the incumbent of its legitimate authority.  Readers of Crito will remember the argument with which Socrates represents the laws of the city as pleading with him on the subject of his escape.  Among others he makes them (the laws, or the state) say:—­“Since you were begotten and nurtured and educated under us, dare you once to say you are not our offspring and servant, you and your fathers before you!” These are words which do not impress us as any thing extraordinary; for the same thing has long been on the lips of Bushido, with this modification, that the laws and the state were represented with us by a personal being.  Loyalty is an ethical outcome of this political theory.

I am not entirely ignorant of Mr. Spencer’s view according to which political obedience—­Loyalty—­is accredited with only a transitional function.[18] It may be so.  Sufficient unto the day is the virtue thereof.  We may complacently repeat it, especially as we believe that day to be a long space of time, during which, so our national anthem says, “tiny pebbles grow into mighty rocks draped with moss.”  We may remember at this juncture that even among so democratic a people as the English, “the sentiment of personal fidelity to a man and his posterity which their Germanic ancestors felt for their chiefs, has,” as Monsieur Boutmy recently said, “only passed more or less into their profound loyalty to the race and blood of their princes, as evidenced in their extraordinary attachment to the dynasty.”

[Footnote 18:  Principles of Ethics, Vol.  I, Pt.  II, Ch.  X.]

Political subordination, Mr. Spencer predicts, will give place to loyalty to the dictates of conscience.  Suppose his induction is realized—­will loyalty and its concomitant instinct of reverence disappear forever?  We transfer our allegiance from one master to another, without being unfaithful to either; from being subjects of a ruler that wields the temporal sceptre we become servants of the monarch who sits enthroned in the penetralia of our heart.  A few years ago a very stupid controversy, started by the misguided disciples of Spencer, made havoc among the reading class of Japan.  In their zeal to uphold the claim of the throne to undivided loyalty, they charged Christians with treasonable propensities