In Japan, until the Meiji era, human life was cheap.  For criminals of the military classes, suicide was the honorable method of leaving this world; the lower orders of society suffered loss of life at the hands of the military class without redress.  The whole nation accepted the low standards of human value; woman was valued chiefly, if not entirely, on a utilitarian basis, that, namely, of bearing children, doing house and farm work, and giving men pleasure.  So far as I know, not among all the teachings of Confucius or Buddha was the supreme value of human life, as such, once suggested, much less any adequate conception of the worth and nature of woman.  The entire social order was constructed without these two important truths.

By a great effort, however, Japan has introduced a new social order, with unprecedented rapidity.  By one revolution it has established a set of laws in which the equality of all men before the law is recognized at least; for the first time in Oriental history, woman is given the right to seek divorce.  The experiment is now being made on a great scale as to whether the new social order adopted by the rulers can induce those ideas among the people at large which will insure its performance.  Can the mere legal enactments which embody the principles of human equality and the value of human life, regardless of sex, beget those fundamental conceptions on which alone a steady and lasting government can rest?  Can Japan really step into the circle of Western nations, without abandoning her pagan religions and pushing onward into Christian monotheism with all its corollaries as to the relations and mutual duties of man?  All earnest men are crying out for a strengthening of the moral life of the nation through the reform of the family and are proclaiming the necessity of monogamy; but, aside from the Christians, none appear to see how this is to be done.  Even Mr. Fukuzawa says that the first step in the reform of the family and the establishment of monogamy is to develop public sentiment against prostitution and plural or illegal marriage; and the way to do this is first to make evil practices secret.  This, he says, is more important than to give women a higher education.  He does not see that Christianity with its conceptions of immediate responsibility of the individual to God, the loving Heavenly Father, and of the infinite value of each human soul, thus doing away with the utilitarian scale for measuring both men and women, together with its conceptions of the relations of the sexes and of man to man, can alone supply that foundation for all the elements of the new social order, intellectual and emotional, which will make it workable and permanent, and of which monogamy is but one element.[L] He does not see that representative government and popular rights cannot stand for any length of time on any other foundation.

X

CHEERFULNESS—­INDUSTRY—­TRUTHFULNE
SS—­SUSPICIOUSNESS