Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/248

 employed his power in a singular fashion. A high official had caused a man to be put to death on a trumped-up accusation in order to possess himself of the widow. She, flying to the castle of Iyeyasu, made her complaint; whereupon the Tokugawa ruler ordered the official to commit suicide, and then compelled the woman to become his own concubine. These examples constitute only a fraction of the recorded catalogue, but, on the other side, there is nowhere to be seen a figure ennobled by purity of life; nowhere a man whose love of one woman and one only stands prominent among the motives of his great deeds. Such men there may have been, but they are not found among the makers of the nation's history. To woman alone was left the honour of practising conjugal fidelity and virtuous self-restraint, and the ideal of objective virtue she attained contrasts vividly with the abyss of self-indulgence into which the other sex fell.

Abuse of the marital tie inflicted its own penalty. In ancient and in medieval days the most prolific source of dissension was succession to an estate. Nearly every man of rank or station had at least one concubine as well as a wife, and in the absence of an heir born of the latter the former perpetually intrigued to have her son declared heir in preference to the next of kin or to the son by adoption. Then it happened, not infrequently, that after an illegitimate child had been