essential way is looked down upon, there high forms of affection are by the nature of the case impossible, though some affection doubtless exists; it necessarily attains only a rudimentary development.  Now it is conspicuous that the conception of the nature and purpose of woman, as held in the Orient, has always been debasing to her.  Though individual women might rise above their assigned position the whole social order, as established by the leaders of thought, was against her.  The statement that there was a primitive condition of society in Japan in which the affectionate relations between husband and wife now known in the West prevailed, is, I think, a mistake.

We must remember, in the second place, what careful students of human evolution have pointed out, that those tribes and races in which the family was most completely consolidated, that is to say, those in which the power of the father was absolute, were the ones to gain the victory over their competitors.  The reason for this is too obvious to require even a statement.  Every conquering race has accordingly developed the “patria potestas” to a greater or less degree.  Now one general peculiarity of the Orient is that that stage of development has remained to this day; it has not experienced those modifications and restrictions which have arisen in the West.  The national government dealt with families and clans, not with individuals, as the final social unit.  In the West, however, the individual has become the civil unit; the “patria potestas” has thus been all but lost.  This, added to religious and ethical considerations, has given women and children an ever higher place both in society and in the home.  Had this loss of authority by the father been accompanied with a weakening of the nation, it would have been an injury; but, in the West, his authority has been transferred to the nation.  These considerations serve to render more intelligible and convincing the main proposition of these chapters, that the distinctive emotional characteristics of the Japanese are not inherent; they are the results of the social and industrial order; as this order changes, they too will surely change.  The entire civilization of a land takes its leading, if not its dominant, color from the estimate set by the people as a whole on the value of human life.  The relatively late development of the tender affections, even in the West, is due doubtless to the extreme slowness with which the idea of the inherent value of a human being, as such, has taken root, even though it was clearly taught by Christ.  But the leaven of His teaching has been at work for these hundreds of years, and now at last we are beginning to see its real meaning and its vital relation to the entire progress of man.  It may be questioned whether Christ gave any more important impetus to the development of civilization than by His teaching in regard to the inestimable worth of man, grounding it, as He did, on man’s divine sonship.  Those nations which insist on valuing human life only by the utilitarian standard, and which consequently keep woman in a degraded place, insisting on concubinage and all that it implies, are sure to wane before those nations which loyally adopt and practice the higher ideals of human worth.  The weakness of heathen lands arises in no slight degree from their cheap estimate of human life.