Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/244

 punishment" had long been counted one of the administrator's most effective weapons. If a farmer absconded leaving his taxes unpaid, or fled to another district in the hope of finding lighter feudal burdens, his whole family, his relatives and his friends, were included in the circle of his penalty. No more profoundly pathetic spectacle presents itself in all the drama of Japanese history than the fate of the family of Sogoro, the noble farmer who, because he presented a petition on behalf of his tax-burdened fellow-rustics, was crucified with his wife and two little sons. The only excuse, a very slender one, that can be offered for such cruelty is that this device of converting a man's relatives and friends into constables interested in securing his obedience to the laws, was not of Japanese origin. It had been borrowed, in the seventh century, from China, where the chain of vicarious responsibility used to be drawn out to extraordinary length. But no era of Japanese annals was more disfigured by its exercise than the centuries of the bushi's supremacy. The plea of established custom is not without validity. But what can extenuate the conduct of Iyeyasu when he caused his wife to be executed for plotting against him, and compelled his son to commit suicide in expiation of a crime which the unfortunate youth had not been proved to have committed, and, in fact, had not committed; or of Iyemitsu, the third Tokugawa Shōgun, who condemned his brother