Throughout the land the newspapers are discussing the pros and cons of monogamy and polygamy.  In January of 1898 the Jiji Shimpo, one of the leading daily papers of Tokyo, had a series of articles on the subject from the pen of one of the most illustrious educators of New Japan, Mr. Fukuzawa.  His school, the “Keio Gijiku,” has educated more thousands of young men than any other, notwithstanding the fact that it is a private institution.  Though not a Christian himself, nor making any professions of advocating Christianity, yet Mr. Fukuzawa has come out strongly in favor of monogamy.  His description of the existing social and family life is striking, not to say sickening.  If I mistake not, it is he who tells of a certain noble lady who shed tears at the news of the promotion of her husband in official rank; and when questioned on the matter she confessed that, with added salary, he would add to the number of his concubines and to the frequency of his intercourse with famous dancing and singing girls.

The distressing state of family life may also be gathered from the large numbers of public and secret prostitutes that are to be found in all the large cities, and the singing girls of nearly every town.  According to popular opinion, their number is rapidly increasing.  Though this general subject trenches on morality rather than on the topic immediately before us, yet it throws a lurid light on this question also.  It lets us see, perhaps, more clearly than we could in any other way, how deficient is the average home life of the people.  A professing Christian, a man of wide experience and social standing, not long since seriously argued at a meeting of a Young Men’s Christian Association that dancing and singing girls are a necessary part of Japanese civilization to-day.  He argued that they supply the men with that female element in social life which the ordinary woman cannot provide; were the average wives and daughters sufficiently accomplished to share in the social life of the men as they are in the West, dancing and singing girls, being needless, would soon cease to be.

One further question in this connection merits our attention.  How are we to account for an order of society that allows so little scope for the natural affections of the heart, unless by saying that that order is the true expression of their nature?  Must we not say that the element of affection in the present social order is deficient because the Japanese themselves are naturally deficient?  The question seems more difficult than it really is.

In the first place, the affectionate relation existing between husbands and wives and between parents and children, in Western lands, is a product of relatively recent times.  In his exhaustive work on “The History of Human Marriage,” Westermarck makes this very plain.  Wherever the woman is counted a slave, is bought and sold, is considered as merely a means of bearing children to the family, or in any