Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/138

 filial piety should be allowed to take a family name and to carry a sword, and should receive a money reward equivalent to £8 if he was a married man and £32 if single. Land-owners being regarded as more opulent than tenant-farmers and therefore less likely to neglect their parents, were not so greatly encouraged, but if a land-owner having a large family and many domestics to support gave proof of strong filial piety, he was absolved from the duty of paying taxes. It does not appear, however, that the system of signal rewards extended to tradesmen, who stood lowest among commoners. Evidently in the presence of such legislation the idea of refusing to make any sacrifice demanded by parents or suggested by their circumstances could scarcely be entertained by a child, and little practical value attached to the legal provision that without the consent of the child a bargain of servitude could not be binding. A false standard of rightful authority was created in a parent's mind and a false estimate of filial obligation in a child's, so that it became a common practice for a mother or father to sell a daughter to a brothel or pledge her to servitude for a term of years in some other position scarcely less painful. The literature of the Tokugawa era presents many examples of girls who made heroic sacrifices of that nature for the sake of their families or were sacrificed by them. Indeed this custom has always been one of the darkest blots upon Japanese civilisation, nor can it be honestly