Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/95

 deter crime, not to avenge it. Of course traces of old customs remained in the compilations. All men were not equal before the law, the military retaining some of their special privileges; robbery with violence continued to be punishable with death; a husband detecting his wife in the act of adultery, might still slay the woman and her lover, and a master did not render himself liable to any penalty for beating a servant unless death resulted. But on the whole it is apparent, from the work of these Japanese commissioners, that they were guided by highly enlightened principles, and that, although without foreign aid the great legal reforms of modern Japan could not have been so quickly consummated, they would certainly have been undertaken and carried through. The fact well deserves attention, for it furnishes a complete answer to the often preferred charge that Japan's modern laws and legal procedure are the outcome, not of a sincerely progressive impulse, but of a romantic desire to recover her judicial autonomy. "Had the foreigner within her gates been from the first judiciable by her tribunals, had she not been humiliated by his refusal to entrust his person and property to her keeping, she would have remained content with her old system." That is what her detractors say. It is evident that they never studied the codes compiled solely by Japanese experts long before the question of judicial autonomy had become a living issue.