[Footnote D:  Only since the coming of the new period has it become possible for a woman to gain a divorce from her husband.]

[Footnote E:  Chapter xxix.  Some may care to read this chapter at this point.]

[Footnote F:  Cf. chapter ii.]

[Footnote G:  “Kokoro,” by L. Hearn, p. 31.]

[Footnote H:  Japan Mail, September 30, 1899.]

[Footnote I:  Part II. p. xxxii.]

[Footnote J:  Japan Mail, June 4, 1898, p. 586.]

[Footnote K:  If all that has been said above as to the relative lack of affection between husband and wife is true, it will help to make more credible, because more intelligible, the preceding chapter as to the relative lack of love for children.  Where the relation between husband and wife is what we have depicted it, where the children are systematically taught to feel for their father respect rather than love, the relation between the father and the children, or the mother and the children, cannot be the same as in lands where all these customs are reversed.]

[Footnote L:  The effect of Christian missions cannot be measured by the numbers of those who are to be counted on the church rolls; almost unconsciously the nation is absorbing Christian ideals from the hundreds of Christian missionaries and tens of thousands of Christian natives.  The necessities of the new social order make their teachings intelligible and acceptable as the older social order did not and could not.  This accounts for the astonishing change in the anti-Christian spirit of the Japanese.  This spirit did not cease at once on the introduction of the new social order, nor indeed is it now entirely gone.  But the change from the Japan of thirty years ago to the Japan of to-day, in its attitude toward Christianity, is more marked than that of any great nation in history.  A similar change in the Roman Empire took place, but it required three hundred years.  This change in Japan may accordingly be called truly miraculous, not in the sense, however, of a result without a cause, for the causes are well understood.

Among the Christians, especially, the old order is rapidly giving way to the new.  Christianity has brought a new conception of woman and her place in the home and her relation to her husband.  Japanese Christian girls, and recently non-Christian girls, are seeking an education which shall fit them for their enlarging life.  Many of the more Christian young men do not want heathen wives, with their low estimate of themselves and their duties, and they are increasingly unwilling to marry those of whom they know nothing and for whom they care not at all.  Already the idea that love is the only safe foundation for the home is beginning to take root in Japan.  This changing ideal is bringing marked social changes.  In some churches an introduction committee is appointed whose special function is to introduce marriageable persons and to hold social meetings where the young