Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/39

Rh a wholly commercial basis. Patriarchal manners—contented submission, fidelity, courtesy—yield a rich return of domestic happiness. The struggle for life and for wealth is tempered by self-sacrificing customs and amenities. If the apprentice be willing to work for no other wage than his master's approval and satisfaction through long probationary years, the master, on his side, will resign his charge into the hands of a younger generation before decrepitude has come to rob "honourable retirement" of its grace. If the young wife devote her summer to unquestioning service of her husband and his parents, she has her reward when her sons' wives repay her with the same filial homage. Similar ties, imposing restraint on egoism and sanctified by public esteem, have had their full share in developing those amiable qualities which every observer has acknowledged. But the break-up of feudal society cannot fail to react on the manners which reflected feudal discipline. The Western ideals of liberty, equality, and self-assertion, the decay of religious belief, the necessity of fighting on even terms in the great competitive mêlée to the tune of "The devil take the hindmost, oh!" and, it must be added, the example set by the rest of the world, which does not practise altruism, whatever its representatives may preach, all these factors tend to harden and sharpen the modernised Japanese.

A curious sign of the independent spirit, nourished on new ideas and strangely at variance with the old, is the organised indiscipline of schoolboys. During the six months which the writer spent in the country two flagrant cases occurred of defiance of authority, by no means unusual, it would appear, in scholastic experience, if one might judge by the comments of the local Press.