Speaking generally of rural people my visitor said:  “They are falling into miserable conditions, are in effect spending what was accumulated by their ancestors.  Their houses are not so practical and cost more.  They think they live better but their physical condition is not better.  The number who cannot earn much is increasing.”  I was told of a growing habit among village boys of running off to Tokyo without their parents’ permission.  And bands of girls came to the district to help in the silk-worm season “often without their parents’ approval.”

Many villagers consulted my visitor on all sorts of subjects until he had almost no leisure.  Some wanted counsel about the future of their children, some desired advice about the family debt, some wanted to know how to put an end to quarrels and some asked “how a man will be able to be easy-minded.”  The ordinary result of the primary school system was “a mass of many informations in young brains and they cannot tell wisdom from knowledge.  The result is that they are discontented with their hard lot.  They grow up wishing to rob each other within the bounds of the law.  They want to live comfortably without hard work.  Good customs which were the crystallisation of the experience of our race are dying away.”

My visitor had met an old woman on the road clad miserably.  She earned as a labourer on a farm, beside her board and lodging, 25 sen daily.  Of this sum she handed to a fellow-villager whom she trusted 20 sen.  He gave away many clothes to the poor and her contribution was used with the money he expended.  “If,” said she, “one shall give to God a small thing in darkness then it is accepted to its full value, but, if it be known, it is accepted only at a small value.”  She was “content and quite happy.”

This woman and many others in the district had a primitive kind of religion.  They observed the days called “waiting for the sun” and “waiting for the moon.”  “The same-minded people gather.  The one most deeply experienced tells something to those assembled and they begin to be imbued with the same spirit.  It is some kind of transformed worship of the sun god.  They feel the mercy of the sun.  They do not worship the heavenly bodies but as the symbol of the merciful universe.  These people take meals together several times in a year.  They talk not only on spiritual but on common things and about the news in the papers.  It may seem to a stranger that what they talk is foolish, but they have a wonderful power to attract the essential out of those trifles.”

“The fundamental power which made Japan what it is,” the speaker went on with animation, “is not institutions and statesmen, but those primitive religious acts.  The people strongly resembling the old woman I spoke of may be only 1 per cent., but almost all villagers are imbued with such religious notions and feel thankfulness, and on rare occasions a latent sentiment springs from their hearts.  Their religion may be connected with