Part 15

The slow weakening of the Tokugawa Shogunate was due to causes not unlike those which had brought about the decline of previous regencies: the race degenerated during that long period of peace which its rule had inaugurated; the strong builders were succeeded by feebler and feebler men. Nevertheless the machinery of administration, astutely devised by Iyeyasu, and further perfected by Iyemitsu, worked so well that the enemies of the Shogunate could find no opportunity for a successful attack until foreign aggression unexpectedly came to their aid. The most dangerous enemies of the government were the great clans of Satsuma and Choshu. Iyeyasu had not ventured to weaken them beyond a certain point: the risks of the undertaking would have been great; and, on the other hand, the alliance of those clans was for the time being a matter of vast political importance. He only took measures to preserve a safe balance of power, placing between those formidable allies new lordships in whose rulers he could put trust,--a trust based first upon interest, secondly upon kinship. But he always felt that danger to the Shogunate might come from Satsuma and Choshu; and he left to his successors careful instructions about the policy to be followed in dealing with such possible enemies. He felt that his work was not perfect,--that certain outlying blocks of the structure had not been properly clamped to the rest. He could not do more in the direction of consolidation, simply because the material of society had not yet sufficiently evolved, had not yet become plastic enough, to permit of perfect and permanent cohesion. In order to effect that, it would have been necessary to dissolve the clans. But Iyeyasu did all that human foresight could have safely attempted under the circumstances; and no one was more keenly conscious than himself of the weak points in his wonderful organization.

For more than two hundred years the Satsuma and Choshu clans, and several others ready to league with them, submitted to the discipline of the Tokugawa rule. But they chafed under it, and watched for a chance to break the yoke. All the while this chance was being slowly created for them--not by any political changes, but by the patient toil of Japanese men of letters. Three among these--the greatest scholars that Japan ever produced--especially prepared the way, by their intellectual labours, for the abolition of the Shogunate. They were Shinto scholars; and they represented the not unnatural reaction of native conservatism against the long tyranny of alien ideas and alien beliefs,--against the literature and philosophy and bureaucracy of China,--against the preponderant influence upon education of the foreign religion of Buddhism. To all this they opposed the old native literature of Japan, the ancient poetry, the ancient cult, the early traditions and rites of Shinto. The names of these three remarkable men were Mabuchi (1697-1769), Motowori (1730-1801), and Hirata (1776-1843). Their efforts actually resulted in the disestablishment of Buddhism, and in the great Shinto revival of 1871.

The intellectual revolution made by these scholars could have been prepared only during a long era of peace, and by men enjoying the protection and patronage of members of the ruling class. By a strange chance, it was the house of Tokugawa itself which first gave to literature such encouragement and aid as made possible the labours of the Shinto scholars. Iyeyasu had been a lover of learning; and had devoted the later years of his life--passed in retirement at Shidzuoka--to the collection of ancient books and manuscripts. He bequeathed his Japanese books to his eighth son, the Prince of Owari; and his Chinese books to another son, the Prince of Kishu. The Prince of Owari himself composed several works upon Japanese early literature. Other descendants of Iyeyasu, inherited the great Shogun's love of letters: one of his grandsons, Mitsukuni, the second Prince of Mito (1622-1700), compiled, with the aid of various scholars, the first, important history of Japan,--the Dai-Nihon-Shi, in 240 books. Also he compiled a work of 500 volumes upon the ceremonies and the etiquette of the Imperial Court, and set aside from his revenues a sum equal to about 30,000 pounds per annum, to cover the cost of publishing the splendid productions.... Under the patronage of great lords like these--collectors of libraries--there gradually developed a new school of men-of-letters: men who turned away from Chinese literature to the study of the Japanese classics. They reedited the ancient poetry and chronicles; they republished the sacred records, with ample commentaries. They produced whole libraries of works upon religious, historical, and philological subjects; they made grammars and dictionaries; they wrote treatises on the art of poetry, on popular errors, on the nature of the gods, on government, on the manners and customs of ancient days.... The foundations of this new scholarship were laid by two Shinto priests,--Kada and Mabuchi.

The high patrons of learning never suspected the possible results of those researches which they had encouraged and aided. The study of the ancient records, the study of Japanese literature, the study of the early political and religious conditions, naturally led men to consider the history of those foreign literary influences which had well-nigh stifled native learning, and to consider also the history of the foreign creed which had overwhelmed the religion of the ancestral gods. Chinese ethics, Chinese ceremonial, and Chinese Buddhism had reduced the ancient faith to the state of a minor belief--almost to the state of a superstition. "The Shinto gods," exclaimed one of the scholars of the new school, "have become the servants of the Buddhas!" But those Shinto gods were the ancestors of the race,--the fathers of its emperors and princes,--and their degradation could not but involve the degradation of the imperial tradition. Already, indeed, the emperors had been deprived not only of their immemorial rights and privileges, but of their revenues: many had been deposed and banished and insulted. Just as the gods had been admitted only as inferior personages to the Buddhist pantheon, so their living descendants were now permitted to reign only as the dependants of military usurpers. By sacred law the whole soil of the empire belonged to the Heavenly Sovereign: yet there had been great poverty at times in the imperial palace; and the revenues, allotted for the maintenance of the Mikado, had often been insufficient to relieve his family from want. Assuredly all this was wrong. The Shogunate had indeed established peace and inaugurated prosperity; but who could forget that it had originated in a military usurpation of imperial rights? Only by the restoration of the Son of Heaven to his ancient position of power, and by the relegation of the military chiefs to their proper state of subordination, could the best interests of the nation be really served....

All this was thought and felt and strongly suggested; but not all of it was openly proclaimed. To have publicly preached against the military government as a usurpation would have been to invite destruction. The Shinto scholars dared only so much as the politics and the temper of their time seemed to permit,--though they closely approached the danger-line. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, their teaching had created a strong party in favour of the official revival of the ancient religion, the restoration of the Mikado to supreme power, and the repression, if not suppression, of the military power. Yet it was not until the year 1841 that the Shogunate took alarm, and proclaimed its disquiet by banishing from the capital the great scholar Hirata, and forbidding him to write anything more. Not long afterwards he died. But he had been able to teach for forty years; he had written and published several hundred volumes; and the school of which he was the last and greatest theologian already exerted far-reaching influence. The restive lords of Choshu, Satsuma, Tosa, and Hizen were watching and waiting. They perceived the worth of the new ideas to their own policy; they encouraged the new Shintoism; they felt that a time was coming when they could hope to shake off the domination of the Tokugawa. And their opportunity came at last with the advent to Japan of Commodore Perry's fleet.

The events of that time are well known, and need not here be dwelt upon at any length. Suffice to say that after the Shogunate had been terrified into making commercial treaties with the United States and other powers, and practically compelled to open sundry ports to foreign trade, great discontent arose and was fomented as much as possible by the enemies of the military government. Meanwhile the Shogunate had ascertained for itself the impossibility of resisting foreign aggression: it was fairly well informed as to the strength of Western countries. The imperial court was nowise informed; and the Shogunate naturally dreaded to furnish the information. To acknowledge incapacity to resist Occidental aggression would be to invite the ruin of the Tokugawa house; to resist, on the other hand, would be to invite the destruction of the Empire. The enemies of the Shogunate then persuaded the imperial court to order the expulsion of the foreigners; and this order--which, it must be remembered, was essentially a religious order, emanating from the source of all acknowledged authority--placed the military government in a serious dilemma. It tried to effect by diplomacy what it could not accomplish by force; but while it was negotiating for the withdrawal of the foreign' settlers, matters were suddenly forced to a crisis by the Prince of Choshu, who fired upon various ships belonging to the foreign powers. This action provoked the bombardment of Shimonoseki, and the demand of an indemnity of three million dollars. The Shogun Iyemochi attempted to chastise the daimyo of Choshu for this act of hostility; but the attempt only proved the weakness of the military government. Iyemochi died soon after this defeat; and his successor Hitotsubashi had no chance to do anything,--for the now evident feebleness of the Shogunate gave its enemies courage to strike a fatal blow. Pressure was brought upon the imperial court to proclaim the abolition of the Shogunate; and the Shogunate was abolished by decree. Hitotsubashi submitted; and the Tokugawa regime thus came to an end,--although its more devoted followers warred for two years afterwards, against hopeless odds, to reestablish it. In 1867 the entire administration was reorganized; the supreme power, both military and civil, being restored to the Mikado. Soon afterward the Shinto cult, officially revived in its primal simplicity, was declared the Religion of State; and Buddhism was disendowed. Thus the Empire was reestablished upon the ancient lines; and all that the literary party had hoped for seemed to be realized--except one thing....

Be it here observed that the adherents of the literary party wanted to go much further than the great founders of the new Shintoism had dreamed of going. These later enthusiasts were not satisfied with the abolition of the Shogunate, the restoration of imperial power, and the revival of the ancient cult: they wanted a return of all society to the simplicity of primitive times; they desired that all foreign influence should be got rid of, and that the official ceremonies, the future education, the future literature, the ethics, the laws, should be purely Japanese. They were not even satisfied with the disendowment of Buddhism: there was a vigorous proposal made for its total suppression! And all this would have signified, in more ways than one, a social retrogression towards barbarism. The great scholars had never proposed to cast away Buddhism and all Chinese learning; they had only insisted that the native religion and culture should have precedence. But the new literary party desired what would have been equivalent to the destruction of a thousand years' experience. Happily the clansmen who had broken down the Shogunate saw both past and future in another light. They understood that the national existence was in peril, and that resistance to foreign pressure would be hopeless. Satsuma had witnessed the bombardment of Kagoshima in 1863; Choshu, the bombardment of Shimonoseki in 1864. Evidently the only chance of being able to face Western power would be through the patient study of Western science; and the survival of the Empire depended upon the Europeanization of society. By 1871 the daimiates were abolished; in 1873 the edicts against Christianity were withdrawn; in 1876 the wearing of swords was prohibited. The samurai, as a military body, were suppressed; and all classes were declared thenceforward equal before the law. New codes were compiled; a new army and navy organized; a new police system established; a new system of education introduced at Government expense; and a new constitution promised. Finally, in 1891, the first Japanese parliament (strictly speaking) was convoked. By that time the entire framework of society had been remodelled, so far as laws could remodel it, upon a European pattern. The nation had fairly entered upon its third period of integration. The clan had been legally dissolved; the family was no longer the legal unit of society: by the new constitution the individual had been recognized.

When we consider the history of some vast and sudden political change in its details only,--the factors of the movement, the combinations of immediate cause and effect, the influences of strong personality, the conditions impelling individual action, --then the transformation is apt to appear to us the work and the triumph of a few superior minds. We forget, perhaps, that those minds themselves were the product of their epoch, and that every such rapid change must represent the working of a national or race-instinct quite as much as the operation of individual intelligence. The events of the Meiji reconstruction strangely illustrate the action of such instinct in the face of peril,--the readjustment of internal relations to sudden changes of environment. The nation had found its old political system powerless before the new conditions; and it transformed that system. It had found its military organization incapable of defending it; and it reconstructed that organization. It had found its educational system useless in the presence of unforeseen necessities; and it replaced that system,--simultaneously crippling the power of Buddhism, which might otherwise have offered serious opposition to the new developments required. And in that hour of greatest danger the national instinct turned back at once to the moral experience upon which it could best rely,--the experience embodied in its ancient cult, the religion of unquestioning obedience. Relying upon Shinto tradition, the people rallied about their ruler, descendant of the ancient gods, and awaited his will with unconquerable zeal of faith. By strict obedience to his commands the peril might be averted,--never otherwise: this was the national conviction. And the imperial order was simply that the nation should strive by study to make itself, as far as possible, the intellectual equal of its enemies. How faithfully that command was obeyed,--how well the old moral discipline of the race served it in the period of that supreme emergency,--I need scarcely say. Japan, by right of self-acquired strength, has entered into the circle of the modern civilized powers,--formidable by her new military organization, respectable through her achievements in the domain of practical science. And the force to effect this astonishing self-improvement, within the time of thirty years, she owes assuredly to the moral habit derived from her ancient cult,--the religion of the ancestors. To fairly measure the feat, we should remember that Japan was evolutionally younger than any modern European nation, by at least twenty-seven hundred years, when she went to school! ...

Herbert Spencer has shown that the great value to society of ecclesiastical institutions lies in their power to give cohesion to the mass,--to strengthen rule by enforcing obedience to custom, and by opposing innovations likely to supply any element of disintegration. In other words, the value of a religion, from the sociological standpoint, lies in its conservatism. Various writers have alleged that the Japanese national religion proved itself weak by incapacity to resist the overwhelming influence of Buddhism. I cannot help thinking that the entire social history of Japan yields proof to the contrary. Though Buddhism did for a long period appear to have almost entirely absorbed Shinto, by the acknowledgment of the Shinto scholars themselves; though Buddhist emperors reigned who neglected or despised the cult of their ancestors; though Buddhism directed, during ten centuries, the education of the nation, Shinto remained all the while so very much alive that it was able not only to dispossess its rival at last, but to save the country from foreign domination. To assert that the Shinto revival signified no more than a stroke of policy imagined by a group of statesmen, is to ignore all the antecedents of the event. No such change could have been wrought by mere decree had not the national sentiment welcomed it.... Moreover, there are three important facts to be remembered in regard to the former Buddhist predomination: (1) Buddhism conserved the family-cult, modifying the forms of the rite; (2) Buddhism never really supplanted the Ujigami cults, but maintained them; (3) Buddhism never interfered with the imperial cult. Now these three forms of ancestor-worship,--the domestic, the communal, and the national,--constitute all that is vital in Shinto. No single essential of the ancient faith had ever been weakened, much less abolished, under the long pressure of Buddhism.

The Supreme Cult is not now the State Religion by request of the chiefs of Shinto, it is not even officially classed as a religion. Obvious reasons of state policy decided this course. Having fulfilled its grand task, Shinto abdicated. But as representing all those traditions which appeal to race-feeling, to the sentiment of duty, to the passion of loyalty, and the love of country, it yet remains an immense force, a power to which appeal will not be vainly made in another hour of national peril.

SURVIVALS

In the gardens of certain Buddhist temples there are trees which have been famous for centuries,--trees trained and clipped into extraordinary shapes. Some have the form of dragons; others have the form of pagodas, ships, umbrellas. Supposing that one of these trees were abandoned to its own natural tendencies, it would eventually lose the queer shape so long imposed upon it; but the outline would not be altered for a considerable time, as the new leafage would at first unfold only in the direction of least resistance: that is to say, within limits originally established by the shears and the pruning-knife. By sword and law the old Japanese society had been pruned and clipped, bent and bound, just like such a tree; and after the reconstructions of the Meiji period,--after the abolition of the daimiates, and the suppression of the military class, it still maintained its former shape, just as the tree would continue to do when first abandoned by the gardener. Though delivered from the bonds of feudal law, released from the shears of military rule, the great bulk of the social structure preserved its ancient aspect; and the rare spectacle bewildered and delighted and deluded the Western observer. Here indeed was Elf-land,--the strange, the beautiful, the grotesque, the very mysterious,--totally unlike aught of strange and attractive ever beheld elsewhere. It was not a world of the nineteenth century after Christ, but a world of many centuries before Christ: yet this fact--the wonder of wonders--remained unrecognized; and it remains unrecognized by most people even to this day.

Fortunate indeed were those privileged to enter this astonishing fairyland thirty odd years ago, before the period of superficial change, and to observe the unfamiliar aspects of its life: the universal urbanity, the smiling silence of crowds, the patient deliberation of toil, the absence of misery and struggle. Even yet, in those remoter districts where alien influence has wrought but little change, the charm of the old existence lingers and amazes; and the ordinary traveller can little understand what it means. That all are polite, that nobody quarrels, that everybody smiles, that pain and sorrow remain invisible, that the new police have nothing to do, would seem to prove a morally superior humanity. But for the trained sociologist it would prove something different, and suggest something very terrible. It would prove to him that this society had been moulded under immense coercion, and that the coercion must have been exerted uninterruptedly for thousands of years. He would immediately perceive that ethics and custom had not yet become dissociated, and that the conduct of each person was regulated by the will of the rest. He would know that personality could not develop in such a social medium,--that no individual superiority dare assert itself, that no competition would be tolerated. He would understand that the outward charm of this life--its softness, its smiling silence as of dreams--signified the rule of the dead. He would recognize that between those minds and the minds of his own epoch no kinship of thought, no community of sentiment, no sympathy whatever could exist,--that the separating gulf was not to be measured by thousands of leagues, but only by thousands of years,--that the psychological interval was hopeless as the distance from planet to planet. Yet this knowledge probably would not--certainly should not--blind him to the intrinsic charm of things. Not to feel the beauty of this archaic life is to prove oneself insensible to all beauty. Even that Greek world, for which our scholars and poets profess such loving admiration, must have been in many ways a world of the same kind, whose daily mental existence no modern mind could share.

Now that the great social tree, so wonderfully clipped and cared for during many centuries, is losing its fantastic shape, let us try to see how much of the original design can still be traced.

Under all the outward aspects of individual activity that modern Japan presents to the visitor's gaze, the ancient conditions really persist to an extent that no observation could reveal. Still the immemorial cult rules all the land. Still the family-law, the communal law, and (though in a more irregular manner) the clan-law, control every action of existence. I do not refer to any written law, but only to the old unwritten religious law, with its host of obligations deriving from ancestor-worship. It is true that many changes--and, in the opinion of the wise, too many changes--have been made in civil legislation; but the ancient proverb, "Government-laws are only seven-day laws," still represents popular sentiment in regard to hasty reforms. The old law, the law of the dead, is that by which the millions prefer to act and think. Though ancient social groupings have been officially abolished, re-groupings of a corresponding sort have been formed, instinctively, throughout the country districts. In theory the individual is free; in practice he is scarcely more free than were his forefathers. Old penalties for breach of custom have been abrogated; yet communal opinion is able to compel the ancient obedience. Legal enactments can nowhere effect immediate change of sentiment and long-established usage,--least of all among a people of such fixity of character as the Japanese. Young persons are no more at liberty now, than were their fathers and mothers under the Shogunate, to marry at will, to invest their means and efforts in undertakings not sanctioned by family approval, to consider themselves in any way enfranchised from family authority; and it is probably better for the present that they are not. No man is yet complete master of his activities, his time, or his means.

Though the individual is now registered, and made directly accountable to the law, while the household has been relieved from its ancient responsibility for the acts of its members, still the family practically remains the social unit, retaining its patriarchal organization and its particular cult. Not unwisely, the modern legislators have protected this domestic religion: to weaken its bond at this time were to weaken the foundations of the national moral life,--to introduce disintegrations into the most deeply seated structures of the social organism. The new codes forbid the man who becomes by succession the head of a house to abolish that house: he is not permitted to suppress a cult. No legal presumptive heir to the headship of a family can enter into another family as adopted son or husband; nor can he abandon the paternal house to establish an independent family of his own.* Provision has been made to meet extraordinary cases; but no individual is allowed, without good and sufficient reason, to free himself from those traditional obligations which the family-cult imposes. As regards adoption, the new law maintains the spirit of the old, with fresh provision for the conservation of the family religion,--permitting any person of legal age to adopt a son, on the simple condition that the person adopted shall be younger than the adopter. The new divorce-laws do not permit the dismissal of a wife for sterility alone (and divorce for such cause had long been condemned by Japanese sentiment); but, in view of the facilities given for adoption, this reform does not endanger the continuance of the cult. An interesting example of the manner in which the law still protects ancestor-worship is furnished by the fact that an aged and childless widow, last representative of her family, is not permitted to remain without an heir. She must adopt a son if she can: if she cannot, because of poverty, or for other reasons, the local authorities will provide a son for her,--that is to say, a male heir to maintain the family-worship. Such official interference would seem to us tyrannical: it is simply paternal, and represents the continuance of an ancient regulation intended to protect the bereaved against what Eastern faith still deems the supreme misfortune,--the extinction of the home-cult.... In other respects the later codes allow of individual liberty unknown in previous generations. But the ordinary person would not dream of attempting to claim a legal right opposed to common opinion. Family and public sentiment are still more potent than law. The Japanese newspapers frequently record tragedies resulting from the prevention or dissolution of unions; and these tragedies afford strong proof that most young people would prefer even suicide to the probable consequence of a successful appeal to law against family decision.

The communal form of coercion is less apparent in the large cities; but everywhere it endures to some extent, and in the agricultural districts it remains supreme. Between the new conditions and the old there is this difference, that the man who finds the yoke of his district hard to bear can flee from it: he could not do so fifty years ago. But he can flee from it only to enter into another state of subordination of nearly the same kind. Full advantage, nevertheless, has been taken of this modern liberty of movement: thousands yearly throng to the cities; other thousands travel over the country, from province to province; working for a year or a season in one place, then going to another, with little more to hope for than experience of change. Emigration also has been taking place upon an extensive scale; but for the common class of emigrants, at least, the advantage of emigration is chiefly represented by the chance of earning larger wages. A Japanese emigrant community abroad organizes itself upon the home-plan;* and the individual emigrant probably finds himself as much under communal coercion in Canada, Hawaii, or the Philippine Islands, as he could ever have been in his native province. Needless to say that in foreign countries such coercion is more than compensated by the aid and protection which the communal organization insures. But with the constantly increasing number of restless spirits at home, and the ever widening experience of Japanese emigrants abroad, it would seem likely that the power of the commune for compulsory cooperation must become considerably weakened in the near future.

As for the tribal or clan law, it survives to the degree of remaining almost omnipotent in administrative circles, and in all politics. Voters, officials, legislators, do not follow principles in our sense of the word: they follow men, and obey commands. In these spheres of action the penalties of disobedience to orders are endless as well as serious: by a single such offence one may array against oneself powers that will continue their hostile operation for years and years,--unreasoningly, implacably, blindly, with the weight and persistence of natural forces,--of winds or tides. Any comprehension of the history of Japanese politics during the last fifteen years is not possible without some knowledge of clan-history. A political leader, fully acquainted with the history of clan-parties, and their offshoots, can accomplish marvellous things; and even foreign residents, with long experience of Japanese life, have been able, by pressing upon clan-interests, to exercise a very real power in government circles. But to the ordinary foreigner, Japanese contemporary politics must appear a chaos, a disintegration, a hopeless flux. The truth is that most things remain, under varying outward forms, "as all were ordered, ages since,"--though the shiftings have become more rapid, and the results less obvious, in the haste of an era of steam and electricity.

The greatest of living Japanese statesmen, the Marquis Ito, long ago perceived that the tendency of political life to agglomerations, to clan-groupings, presented the most serious obstacle to the successful working of constitutional government. He understood that this tendency could be opposed only by considerations weightier than clan-interests, considerations worthy of supreme sacrifice. He therefore formed a party of which every member was pledged to pass over clan-interests, clique-interests, personal and every other kind of interests, for the sake of national interests. Brought into collision with a hostile cabinet in 1903, this party achieved the feat of controlling its animosities even to the extent of maintaining its foes in power; but large fragments broke off in the process. So profoundly is the grouping-tendency, the clan-sentiment, identified with national character, that the ultimate success of Marquis Ito's policy must still be considered doubtful. Only a national danger--the danger of war,--has yet been able to weld all parties together, to make all wills work as one.

Not only politics, but nearly all phases of modern life, yield evidence that the disintegration of the old society has been superficial rather than fundamental. Structures dissolved have recrystallized, taking forms dissimilar in aspect to the original forms, but inwardly built upon the same plan. For the dissolutions really effected represented only a separation of masses, not a breaking up of substance into independent units; and these masses, again cohering, continue to act only as masses. Independence of personal action, in the Western sense, is still almost inconceivable. The individual of every class above the lowest must continue to be at once coercer and coerced. Like an atom within a solid body, he can vibrate; but the orbit of his vibration is fixed. He must act and be acted upon in ways differing little from those of ancient time.

As for being acted upon, the average man is under three kinds of pressure: pressure from above, exemplified in the will of his superiors; pressure about him, represented by the common will of his fellows and equals; pressure from below, represented by the general sentiment of his inferiors. And this last sort of coercion is not the least formidable.

Individual resistance to the first kind of pressure--that represented by authority--is not even to be thought of; because the superior represents a clan, a class, an exceedingly multiple power of some description; and no solitary individual, in the present order of things, can strive against a combination. To resist injustice he must find ample support, in which case his resistance does not represent individual action.

Resistance to the second kind of pressure--communal coercion --signifies ruin, loss of the right to form a part of the social body.

Resistance to the third sort of pressure, embodied in the common sentiment of inferiors, may result in almost anything,--from momentary annoyance to sudden death,--according to circumstances.

In all forms of society these three kinds of pressure are exerted to some degree; but in Japanese society, owing to inherited tendency, and traditional sentiment, their power is tremendous.

Thus, in every direction, the individual finds himself confronted by the despotism of collective opinion: it is impossible for him to act with safety except as one unit of a combination. The first kind of pressure deprives him of moral freedom, exacting unlimited obedience to orders; the second kind of pressure denies him the right to use his best faculties in the best way for his own advantage (that is to say, denies him the right of free competition); the third kind of pressure compels him, in directing the actions of others, to follow tradition, to forbear innovations, to avoid making any changes, however beneficial, which do not find willing acceptance on the part of his inferiors.

These are the social conditions which, under normal circumstances, make for stability, for conservation; and they represent the will of the dead. They are inevitable to a militant state; they make the strength of that state; they render facile the creation and maintenance of formidable armies. But they are not conditions favourable to success in the future international competition,--in the industrial struggle for existence against societies incomparably more plastic, and of higher mental energy.

MODERN RESTRAINTS