making of a country seat out of a treeless plain by planting the

same with saplings. About the time the trees begin to be worth
having the proprietary landscape-gardener dies of old age. However,

as custom permits a Far Oriental no ancestral growth of timber,
he is obliged to lay the seeds of his own family trees. Natural

offspring are on the whole easier to get, and more satisfactory when
got. Hence the haste with which these peoples rush into matrimony.

If in despite of his precipitation fate perversely refuse to grant
him children, he must endeavor to make good the omission by

artificial means. He proceeds to adopt somebody. True to instinct,
he chooses from preference a collateral relative. In some far-eastern

lands he must so strict" target="_blank" title="vt.限制；限定；约束">restrict himself by law. In Korea, for instance,
he can only adopt an agnate and one of a lower generation than his own.

But in Japan his choice is not so limited. In so praiseworthy an
act as the perpetuation of his unimportant family line, it is deemed

unwise in that progressive land to hinder him from unconsciously
bettering it by the way. He is consequently permitted to adopt

anybody. As people are by no means averse to being adopted, the
power to adopt whom he will gives him more voice in the matter of

his unnatural offspring than he ever had in the selection of a more
natural one.

The adopted changes his name, of course, to take that of the family
he enters. As he is very frequently grown up and extensively known

at the time the adoption takes place, his change of cognomen
occasions at first some slight confusion among his acquaintance.

This would be no worse, however, than the change with us from the
maid to the matron, and intercourse would soon proceed smoothly

again if people would only rest content with one such domestic
migration. But they do not. The fatal facility of the process

tempts them to repeat it. The result is bewildering: a people as
nomadic now in the property of their persons as their forefathers

were in their real estate. A man adopts another to-day to unadopt
him to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after.

So profoundlyunimportant to them is their social identity, that they
bandy it about with almost farcical freedom. Perhaps it is fitting

that there should be some slight preparation in this world for a
future transmigration of souls. Still one fails to conceive that

the practice can be devoid of disadvantages even to its beneficiaries.
To foreigners it proves disastrously perplexing. For if you chance

upon a man whom you have not met for some time, you can never be
quite sure how to accost him. If you begin, "Well met, Green, how

goes it?" as likely as not he replies, "Finely. But I am no longer
Green; I have become Brown. I was adopted last month by my maternal

grandfather." You of course apologize for your unfortunate mistake,
carefully note his change of hue for a future occasion, and behold,

on meeting him the next time you find he has turned Black. Such a
chameleon-like cognomen is very unsettling to your idea of his

identity, and can hardly prove reassuring to his own. The only
persons who reap any benefit from the doubt are those, with us

unhappy, individuals who possess the futilefaculty of remembering
faces without recalling their accompanying names.

Girls, as a rule, are not adopted, being valueless genealogically.
A niece or grandniece to whom one has taken a great fancy might of

course be adopted there as elsewhere, but it would be distinctly out
of the every-day run, as she could never be included in the

household on strict business principles.
The practice of adopting is not confined to childless couples.

Others may find themselves in quite as unfortunate a predicament.
A man may be the father of a large and thriving family and yet be as

destitute patriarchally as if he had not a child to his name.
His offspring may be of the wrong sex; they may all be girls.

In this untoward event the father has something more on his hands
than merely a houseful of daughters to dispose of. In addition to

securing sons-in-law, he must, unless he would have his ancestral
line become extinct, provide himself with a son. The simplest

procedure in such a case is to combine relationships in a single
individual, and the most self-evident person to select for the dual

capacity is the husband of the eldest daughter. This is the course
pursued. Some worthy young man is secured as spouse for the senior

sister; he is at the same time formally taken in as a son by the
family whose cognomen he assumes, and eventually becomes the head of

the house. Strange to say, this vista of gradually unfolding honors
does not seem to prove inviting. Perhaps the new-comer objects to

marrying the whole family, a prejudice not without parallel
elsewhere. Certainly the opportunity is not appreciated. Indeed,

to "go out as a son-in-law," as the Japanese idiom hath it, is
considered demeaning to the matrimonial domestic. Like other

household help he wears too patently the badge of servitude.
"If you have three koku of rice to your name, don't do it," is the

advice of the local proverb--a proverb whose warning against
marrying for money is the more suggestive for being launched in a

land where marrying for love is beyond the pale of respectability.
To barter one's name in this mercenary manner is looked upon as

derogatory to one's self-respect, although, as we have seen, to part
with it for any less direct remuneration is not attended with the

slightest loss of personal prestige. As practically the unfortunate
had none to lose in either event, it would seem to be a case of

taking away from a man that which he hath not. So contumacious a
thing is custom. It is indeed lucky that popular prejudice

interposes some limit to this fictitious method of acquiring
children. A trifling predilection for the real thing in sonships is

absolutely vital, even to the continuance of the artificial variety.
For if one generation ever went in exclusively for adoption, there

would be no subsequentgeneration to adopt.
As it to give the finishing touch to so conventional a system of

society, a man can leave it under certain circumstances with even
greater ease than he entered it. He can become as good as dead

without the necessity of making way with himself. Theoretically, he
can cease to live while still practically existing; for it is always

open to the head of a family to abdicate.
The word abdicate has to our ears a certain regal sound.

We instinctivelyassociate the act with a king. Even the more
democratic expression resign suggests at once an office of public or

quasi public character. To talk of abdicating one's private
relationships sounds absurd; one might as well talk of electing his

parents, it would seem to us. Such misunderstanding of far-eastern
social possibilities comes from our having indulged in digressions

from our more simple nomadic habits. If in imagination we will
return to our ancestral muttons and the then existing order of

things, the idea will not strike us as so strange; for in those
early bucolic days every father was a king. Family economics were

the only political questions in existence then. The clan was the
unit. Domestic disputes were state disturbances, and clan-claims

the only kind of international quarrels. The patriarch was both
father to his people and king.

As time widened the family circle it eventually reached a point
where cohesion ceased to be possible. The centrifugal tendency

could no longer be controlled by the centripetal force. It split up
into separate bodies, each of them a family by itself. In their

turn these again divided, and so the process went on. This
principle has worked universally, the only difference in its action

among different races being the greater or less degree of the
evolving motion. With us the social system has been turning more

and more rapidly with time. In the Far East its force, instead of
increasing, would seem to have decreased, enabling the nebula of its

original condition to keep together as a single mass, so that to-day
a whole nation, resembling a nebula indeed in homogeneity, is swayed

by a single patriarchal principle. Here, on the contrary, so rapid
has the motion become that even brethren find themselves scattered

to the four winds.
An Occidental father and an Oriental head of a family are no longer

really correlative terms. The latter more closely resembles a king
in his duties, responsibilities, and functions generally. Now, in

the Middle Ages in Europe, when a king grew tired of affairs of
state, he abdicated. So in the Far East, when the head of a family

has had enough of active life, he abdicates, and his eldest son
reigns in his stead.

From that moment he ceases to belong to the body politic in any
active sense. Not that he is no longer a member of society nor