Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/223

 to whom they owed the foundations of their fortune, or betraying those that trusted them. Vicarious but striking evidence of the prevalence of such lapses is furnished by the success that attended slanders, and the readiness of men in power to listen to whispers against the fealty of their subordinates or the constancy of their allies. Indeed the victim of unjust slander is a figure encountered perpetually in the annals of mediæval Japan, and the only circumstance that palliates his existence is the sympathy he receives from the dramatist and the historian. If, in those unquiet times, the traducer found a credulous audience, the contumely heaped upon his memory is sufficient indication that his methods were contrary to the moral code of the nation, and especially of the bushi. Moreover, as against these displays of treachery and deceit, must be set the circumstances of the era: an era when a man's strength to defy attack was the measure of his safety; when a state of war being the normal condition of the nation, the wide license of method permissible in war received general sanction, and when no success was too large nor any office too high to be beyond the reach of resolute and unscrupulous daring.

That the vendetta was largely practised in the Military epoch is doubtless attributable mainly to the fact that there did not exist any competent or trustworthy tribunals, acting in the interests of society and ready to undertake the office of