Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/85

 of a single piece of wood. Had the civilisation of the masses kept pace with the religious spirit evoked among the upper classes by Buddhist teachings, the treatment of criminals in Japan would probably have become exceptionally enlightened, for the Emperor Shōmu (724–728), adopting the principle, "the dead cannot be recalled to life, nor the condemned judged again," abolished capital punishment and sought to make compassion the rule of government. But practical experience showed that such an administrative principle was incompatible with the morality of the age, and in less than half a century another sovereign—Kōnin (770–781)—went to the opposite extreme by decreeing that incendiaries and thieves must be led through the city after condemnation and then publicly scourged to death. The treatment of prisoners may be inferred from that one fact; but the records are silent on the subject, nor is it possible to distinguish whether the marked prevalence of crime in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries is attributable chiefly to the savage severity of the criminal laws then in force or to the general unrest of the epoch. When Yoritomo assumed the administrative power at the close of the twelfth century, he greatly improved the judicial procedure, organising metropolitan and local tribunals of first instance and of appeal. But his whole system was informed with a spirit of militarism, and though his drastic methods had