initiative, the habit of sudden resolutions and desperate undertakings, the grand capacity to do and to suffer.’  In Japan as in Italy ’the rude manners of the Middle Ages made of man a superb animal, wholly militant and wholly resistant.’  And this is why the sixteenth century displays in the highest degree the principal quality of the Japanese race, that great diversity which one finds there between minds (esprits) as well as between temperaments.  While in India and even in China men seem to differ chiefly in degree of energy or intelligence, in Japan they differ by originality of character as well.  Now, individuality is the sign of superior races and of civilizations already developed.  If we make use of an expression dear to Nietzsche, we might say that in Asia, to speak of humanity is to speak of its plains; in Japan as in Europe, one represents it above all by its mountains.”

To the pervading characteristics of the men of whom M. de la Mazeliere writes, let us now address ourselves.  I shall begin with

RECTITUDE OR JUSTICE,

the most cogent precept in the code of the samurai.  Nothing is more loathsome to him than underhand dealings and crooked undertakings.  The conception of Rectitude may be erroneous—­it may be narrow.  A well-known bushi defines it as a power of resolution;—­“Rectitude is the power of deciding upon a certain course of conduct in accordance with reason, without wavering;—­to die when it is right to die, to strike when to strike is right.”  Another speaks of it in the following terms:  “Rectitude is the bone that gives firmness and stature.  As without bones the head cannot rest on the top of the spine, nor hands move nor feet stand, so without rectitude neither talent nor learning can make of a human frame a samurai.  With it the lack of accomplishments is as nothing.”  Mencius calls Benevolence man’s mind, and Rectitude or Righteousness his path.  “How lamentable,” he exclaims, “is it to neglect the path and not pursue it, to lose the mind and not know to seek it again!  When men’s fowls and dogs are lost, they know to seek for them again, but they lose their mind and do not know to seek for it.”  Have we not here “as in a glass darkly” a parable propounded three hundred years later in another clime and by a greater Teacher, who called Himself the Way of Righteousness, through whom the lost could be found?  But I stray from my point.  Righteousness, according to Mencius, is a straight and narrow path which a man ought to take to regain the lost paradise.

Even in the latter days of feudalism, when the long continuance of peace brought leisure into the life of the warrior class, and with it dissipations of all kinds and gentle accomplishments, the epithet Gishi (a man of rectitude) was considered superior to any name that signified mastery of learning or art.  The Forty-seven Faithfuls—­of whom so much is made in our popular education—­are known in common parlance as the Forty-seven Gishi.