Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/163

 the Chinese classics. Under the Tokugawa, however, a great improvement took place. At first the Government did not adopt any active measures of direct encouragement; it confined itself to allowing elementary school-teachers to live among the samurai, take a family name, and carry a sword. Such privileges, however, being valued very highly, could not fail to produce considerable effect. The status of teacher acquired unprecedented dignity, and attracted a class of men who would not otherwise have thought of such an occupation. Yoshumune, the eight Shōguns, gave additional importance to elementary education by employing it as a medium for carrying out his policy of making the law familiar to the people. He distributed to school-teachers copies of all newly enacted criminal regulations, together with a Japanese translation of a standard Chinese work on morality, and he liberally rewarded a physician of Shimane who was found to have been giving instruction to children in the Laws of Iyeyasu (Gojōmoku). A great stimulus was imparted to education by these means. Before the middle of the eighteenth century Yedo had about eight hundred teachers who are said to have taught an average of fifty pupils each, and the inhabitants of the other chief cities as well as of the provinces, though not so well equipped, enjoyed educational facilities such as had never before existed. In the towns the teachers were for the