and brilliant generalizations, M. LeBon[29] says, “The discoveries due to the intelligence are the common patrimony of humanity; qualities or defects of character constitute the exclusive patrimony of each people:  they are the firm rock which the waters must wash day by day for centuries, before they can wear away even its external asperities.”  These are strong words and would be highly worth pondering over, provided there were qualities and defects of character which constitute the exclusive patrimony of each people.  Schematizing theories of this sort had been advanced long before LeBon began to write his book, and they were exploded long ago by Theodor Waitz and Hugh Murray.  In studying the various virtues instilled by Bushido, we have drawn upon European sources for comparison and illustrations, and we have seen that no one quality of character was its exclusive patrimony.  It is true the aggregate of moral qualities presents a quite unique aspect.  It is this aggregate which Emerson names a “compound result into which every great force enters as an ingredient.”  But, instead of making it, as LeBon does, an exclusive patrimony of a race or people, the Concord philosopher calls it “an element which unites the most forcible persons of every country; makes them intelligible and agreeable to each other; and is somewhat so precise that it is at once felt if an individual lack the Masonic sign.”

[Footnote 29:  The Psychology of Peoples, p. 33.]

The character which Bushido stamped on our nation and on the samurai in particular, cannot be said to form “an irreducible element of species,” but nevertheless as to the vitality which it retains there is no doubt.  Were Bushido a mere physical force, the momentum it has gained in the last seven hundred years could not stop so abruptly.  Were it transmitted only by heredity, its influence must be immensely widespread.  Just think, as M. Cheysson, a French economist, has calculated, that supposing there be three generations in a century, “each of us would have in his veins the blood of at least twenty millions of the people living in the year 1000 A.D.”  The merest peasant that grubs the soil, “bowed by the weight of centuries,” has in his veins the blood of ages, and is thus a brother to us as much as “to the ox.”

An unconscious and irresistible power, Bushido has been moving the nation and individuals.  It was an honest confession of the race when Yoshida Shoin, one of the most brilliant pioneers of Modern Japan, wrote on the eve of his execution the following stanza;—­

    “Full well I knew this course must end in death;
     It was Yamato spirit urged me on
     To dare whate’er betide.”

Unformulated, Bushido was and still is the animating spirit, the motor force of our country.