have become modified into "history is filiosophy teaching by

example." For in the instructive anecdotes every other form of merit
is depicted as second to that of being a dutiful son. To the

practice of that supremevirtue all other considerations are
sacrificed. The student's aim is thus kept single. At every turn

of the leaves, paragons of filial piety shame the youthful reader to
the pitch of emulation by the epitaphic records of their deeds.

Portraits of the past, possibly colored, present that estimable
trait in so exalted a type that to any less filial a people they

would simply deter competition. Yet the boy implicitly believes and
no doubt resolves to rival what he reads. A specimen or two will

amply suggest the rest. In one tale the hero is held up to the
unqualified admiration of posterity for having starved to death his

son, in an extreme case of family destitution, for the sake of
providing food enough for his aged father. In another he

unhesitatingly divorces his wife for having dared to poke fun, in
the shape of bodkins, at some wooden effigies of his parents which

he had had set up in the house for daily devotional contemplation.
Finally another paragon actually sells himself in perpetuity as a

slave that he may thus procure the wherewithal to bury with due
honor his anything but worthy progenitor, who had first cheated his

neighbors and then squandered his ill-gotten gains in riotous living.
Of these tales, as of certain questionable novels in a slightly

different line, the eventual moral is considered quite competent to
redeem the general immorality of the plot.

Along such a curriculum the youthful Chinaman is made to run.
A very similar system prevails in Japan, the difference between the

two consisting in quantity rather than quality. The books in the
two cases are much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly

little when we consider that in the one case it is his own classics
the student is reading, in the other the Chinaman's.

If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling is over
he is set to learn his father's trade. To undertake to learn any

trade but his father's would strike the family as simply preposterous.
Why should he adopt another line of business? And, if he did, what

other business should he adopt? Is his father's occupation not
already there, a part of the existing order of things; and is he not

the son of his father and heir therefore of the paternal skill?
Not that such inherited aptness is recognized scientifically; it is

simply taken for granted instinctively. It is but a halfhearted
intuition, however, for the possibility of an inheritance from the

mother's side is as out of the question as if her severance from her
own family had an ex post facto effect. As for his individual

predilection in the matter, nature has considerately conformed to
custom by giving him none. He becomes a cabinet-maker, for instance,

because his ancestors always have been cabinet-makers. He inherits
the family business as a necessary part of the family name. He is

born to his trade, not naturally selected because of his fitness for it.
But he usually is amply qualified for the position, for generations

of practice, if only on one side of the house, accumulate a vast
deal of technical skill. The result of this system of clan guilds

in all branches of industry is sufficientlynoticeable. The almost
infinite superiority of Japanese artisans over their European

fellow-craftsmen is world-known. On the other hand the tendency of
the occupation in the abstract to swallow up the individual in the

concrete is as evident to theory as it is patent in practice.
Eventually the man is lost in the manner. The very names of trades

express the fact. The Japanese word for cabinet-maker, for example,
means literally cutting-thing-house, and is now applied as

distinctively to the man as to his shop. Nominally as well as
practically the youthful Japanese artisan makes his introduction to

the world, much after the manner of the hero of Lecocq's comic
opera, the son of the house of Marasquin et Cie.

If instead of belonging to the lower middle class our typical youth
be born of bluer blood, or if he be filled with the same desires as

if he were so descended, he becomes a student. Having failed to
discover in the school-room the futility of his country's

self-vaunted learning, he proceeds to devote his life to its
pursuit. With an application which is eminently praiseworthy, even

if its object be not, he sets to work to steep himself in the
classics till he can perceive no merit in anything else. As might

be suspected, he ends by discovering in the sayings of the past more
meaning than the simple past ever dreamed of putting there.

He becomes more Confucian than Confucius. Indeed, it is fortunate
for the reputation of the sage that he cannot return to earth, for

he might disagree to his detriment with his own commentators.
Such is the state of things in China and Korea. Learning, however,

is not dependentsolely on individual interest for its wonderfully
flourishing condition in the Middle Kingdom, for the government

abets the practice to its utmost. It is itself the supreme sanction,
for its posts are the prizes of proficiency. Through the study of

the classics lies the only entrance to political power. To become a
mandarin one must have passed a series of competitive examinations

on these very subjects, and competition in this impersonal field is
most keen. For while popular enthusiasm for philosophy for

philosophy's sake might, among any people, eventually show symptoms
of fatigue, it is not likely to flag where the outcome of it is so

substantial. Erudition carries there all earthly emoluments in its
train. For the man who can write the most scholastic essay on the

classics is forthwith permitted to amass much honor and more wealth
by wronging his less accomplished fellow-citizens. China is a

student's paradise where the possession of learning is instantly
convertible into unlimited pelf.

In Japan the study of the classics was never pursued professionally.
It was, however, prosecuted with much zeal en amateur. The Chinese

bureaucratic system has been wanting. For in spite of her students,
until within thirty years Japan slumbered still in the Knight-time

of the Middle Ages, and so long as a man carried about with him
continually two beautiful swords he felt it incumbent upon him to

use them. The happy days of knight-errantry have passed. These
same cavaliers of Samurai are now thankful to police the streets in

spectacles necessitated by the too diligent study of German text,
and arrest chance disturbers of the public peace for a miserably

small salary per month.
Our youth has now reached the flowering season of life, that brief

May time when the whole world takes on the rose-tint, and when by
all dramatic laws he ought to fall in love. He does nothing of the

kind. Sad to say, he is a stranger to the feeling. Love, as we
understand the word, is a thing unknown to the Far East;

fortunately, indeed, for the possession there of the tender passion
would be worse than useless. Its indulgence would work no end of

disturbance to the community at large, beside entailing much misery
upon its individual victim. Its exercise would probably be classed

with kleptomania and other like excesses of purely personal
consideration. The community could never permit the practice, for

it strikes at the very root of their whole social system.
The immense loss in happiness to these people in consequence of the

omission by the too parsimonious Fates of that thread, which, with
us, spins the whole of woman's web of life, and at least weaves the

warp of man's, is but incidental to the present subject; the effect
of the loss upon the individuality of the person himself is what

concerns us now.
If there is one moment in a man's life when his interest for the

world at large pales before the engrossing character of his own
emotions, it is assuredly when that man first falls in love.

Then, if never before, the world within excludes the world without.
For of all our human passions none is so isolating as the tenderest.

To shut that one other being in, we must of necessity shut all the
rest of mankind out; and we do so with a reckless trust in our own

self-sufficiency which has about it a touch of the sublime.
The other millions are as though they were not, and we two are alone

in the earth, which suddenly seems to have grown unprecedentedly
beautiful. Indeed, it only needs such judicious depopulation to

make of any spot an Eden. Perhaps the early Jewish myth-makers had
some such thought in mind when they wrote their idyl of the cosmogony.

The human traits are true to-day. Then at last our souls throw
aside their conventional wrappings to stand revealed as they really

are. Certain of comprehension, the thoughts we have never dared