Have you seen in your tour of Japan many a young man with unkempt hair, dressed in shabbiest garb, carrying in his hand a large cane or a book, stalking about the streets with an air of utter indifference to mundane things?  He is the shosei (student), to whom the earth is too small and the Heavens are not high enough.  He has his own theories of the universe and of life.  He dwells in castles of air and feeds on ethereal words of wisdom.  In his eyes beams the fire of ambition; his mind is athirst for knowledge.  Penury is only a stimulus to drive him onward; worldly goods are in his sight shackles to his character.  He is the repository of Loyalty and Patriotism.  He is the self-imposed guardian of national honor.  With all his virtues and his faults, he is the last fragment of Bushido.

Deep-rooted and powerful as is still the effect of Bushido, I have said that it is an unconscious and mute influence.  The heart of the people responds, without knowing the reason why, to any appeal made to what it has inherited, and hence the same moral idea expressed in a newly translated term and in an old Bushido term, has a vastly different degree of efficacy.  A backsliding Christian, whom no pastoral persuasion could help from downward tendency, was reverted from his course by an appeal made to his loyalty, the fidelity he once swore to his Master.  The word “Loyalty” revived all the noble sentiments that were permitted to grow lukewarm.  A band of unruly youths engaged in a long continued “students’ strike” in a college, on account of their dissatisfaction with a certain teacher, disbanded at two simple questions put by the Director,—­“Is your professor a blameless character?  If so, you ought to respect him and keep him in the school.  Is he weak?  If so, it is not manly to push a falling man.”  The scientific incapacity of the professor, which was the beginning of the trouble, dwindled into insignificance in comparison with the moral issues hinted at.  By arousing the sentiments nurtured by Bushido, moral renovation of great magnitude can be accomplished.

One cause of the failure of mission work is that most of the missionaries are grossly ignorant of our history—­“What do we care for heathen records?” some say—­and consequently estrange their religion from the habits of thought we and our forefathers have been accustomed to for centuries past.  Mocking a nation’s history!—­as though the career of any people—­even of the lowest African savages possessing no record—­were not a page in the general history of mankind, written by the hand of God Himself.  The very lost races are a palimpsest to be deciphered by a seeing eye.  To a philosophic and pious mind, the races themselves are marks of Divine chirography clearly traced in black and white as on their skin; and if this simile holds good, the yellow race forms a precious page inscribed in hieroglyphics of gold!  Ignoring the past career of a people, missionaries claim that Christianity is