Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/110

 justly be called the blackest era in the history of Japanese imperialism.

Of course the moral condition of the inferior classes was not better than that of the Court. The selfish aims of religion became so paramount as to deprive it of all dignity. Among the tutelary deities added to the pantheon there were some whose attributes should have deprived them of any title to respect; others whose veneration betrayed a scarcely credible depth of superstition. An extreme example was the worship of caterpillars, which, at that epoch, infested the orange trees and the ginger vines. The changes these insects underwent were considered typical of the poor growing rich, the old renewing their youth, and men built shrines and offered sacrifices to the gods thus manifested.

Society was disfigured by class dissensions. The great families which for over a thousand years had monopolised the principal offices of State as hereditary rights, were no longer represented by one or two households; they had grown to the dimensions of clans, and their members lived on the proceeds of extortion and oppression, secured by the collective protection of the clan against inconvenient results. Profit and prosperity seem to have been the paramount motives of the era. Servants were so indifferent to the dictates of loyalty that they turned their hand against their liege lords, and wives had so little sense of family fidelity that they cheated