If by “personality” is meant consciousness of one’s self as an independent individual, then I do not see what relation the two subjects have.  If, however, it means the willingness of the subjects of marriage to forego their own desires and choices; because indeed they do not have any of their own, then the facts will not bear out the argument.  These writers skillfully choose certain facts out of the family customs whereby to illustrate and enforce this theory, but they entirely omit others having a significant bearing upon it.  Take, for instance, the fact that one-third of the marriages end in divorce.  What does this show?  It shows that one-third of the individuals in each marriage are so dissatisfied with the arrangements made by the parents that they reject them and assert their own choice and decision.  According to the argument for “impersonality” in marriage, these recalcitrant, unsubmissive individuals have a great amount of “personality,” that is, consciousness of self; and this consciousness of self produces a great effect on the other party to the marriage; and the effect on the other party (in the vast majority of the cases women), that is to say, the effect of the divorce on the consciousness of the women, constitutes the personality of the men!  The marriage customs cited, therefore, do not prove the point, for no account is taken of the multitudinous cases in which one party or the other utterly refuses to carry out the arrangements of the parents.  Many a girl declines from the beginning the proposals of the parents.  These cases are by no means few.  Only a few days before writing the present lines a waiting girl in a hotel requested me to find her a place of service in some foreign family.  On inquiry she told me how her parents wished her to marry into a certain family; but that she could not endure the thought and had run away from home.  One of the facts which strike a missionary, as he becomes acquainted with the people, is the frequency of the cases of running away from home.  Girls run away, probably not as frequently as boys, yet very often.  Are we to believe that these are individuals who have an excessive amount of “personality”?  If so, then the development of “personality” in Japan is far more than the advocates of its “impersonality” recognize or would allow us to believe.  Mr. Lowell devotes three pages to a beautiful and truthful description of the experience known in the West as “falling in love.”  Turning his attention to the Orient, because of the fact that marriages are arranged for by the families concerned, he argues that:  “No such blissful infatuation falls to the lot of the Far Oriental.  He never is the dupe of his own desire, the willing victim of his self-delusion.  He is never tempted to reveal himself, and by thus revealing, realize....  For she is not his love; she is only his wife; and what is left of a romance when the romance is left out?” Although there is an element of truth in this, yet it is useless as a support for