Another feature of the old order of things was the emptiness of the lives of the people.  Education was rare.  Limited to the samurai, who composed but a fraction of the population, it was by no means universal even among them.  And such education as they had was confined to the Chinese classics.  Although there were schools in connection with some of the temples, the people as a whole did not learn to read or write.  These were accomplishments for the nobility and men of leisure.  The thoughts of the people were circumscribed by the narrow world in which they lived, and this allowed but an occasional glimpse of other clans through war or a chance traveler.  For, in those times, freedom of travel was not generally allowed.  Each man, as a rule, lived and labored and died where he was born.  The military classes had more freedom.  But when we contrast the breadth of thought and outlook enjoyed by the nation to-day, through newspapers and magazines, with the outlook and knowledge of even the most progressive and learned of those of ancient times, how contracted do their lives appear!

A third feature of former times is the condition of women during those ages.  Eulogizers of Old Japan not only seem to forget that working classes existed then, but also that women, constituting half the population, were essential to the existence of the nation.  Though allowing more freedom than was given to women in other Oriental nations, Japan did not grant such liberty as is essential to the full development of her powers.  “Woman is a man’s plaything” expresses a view still held in Japan.  “Woman’s sole duty is the bearing and rearing of children for her husband” is the dominant idea that has determined her place in the family and in the state for hundreds of years.  That she has any independent interest or value as a human being has not entered into national conception.  “The way in which they are treated by the men has hitherto been such as might cause a pang to any generous European heart....  A woman’s lot is summed up in what is termed ‘the three obediences,’ obedience, while yet unmarried, to a father; obedience, when married, to a husband; obedience, when widowed, to a son.  At the present moment the greatest duchess or marchioness in the land is still her husband’s drudge.  She fetches and carries for him, bows down humbly in the hall when my lord sallies forth on his good pleasure."[C] “The Greater Learning for Women,” by Ekken Kaibara (1630-1714), an eminent Japanese moralist, is the name of a treatise on woman’s duties which sums up the ideas common in Japan upon this subject.  For two hundred years or more it has been used as a text-book in the training of girls.  It enjoins such abject submission of the wife to her husband, to her parents-in-law, and to her other kindred by marriage, as no self-respecting woman of Western lands could for a moment endure.  Let me prove this through a few quotations.