Page:The Awakening of Japan, by Okakura Kakuzō; 1905.djvu/69

 quite wealthy, owing to their possession of a monopoly in the handling of leather and hide, an occupation considered unclean, according to the Buddhist canons. It was from their ranks that the public executioners were appointed. Before the Restoration, when all men were made equal in the eye of the law, any contact with this class was considered a pollution.

The national consciousness, divided within itself by the dams and dikes of its own conventions, could but narrow and finally stagnate. The flow of spontaneity ceased with the end of the seventeenth century. The microscopic tendency of later Oriental thought became in us accentuated to a degree unknown even in China. Our life grew to be like those miniature and dwarf trees that were typical products of the