the most important kind of value which a human being possesses; namely, the intrinsic.  In view of the manifold variety of requisites for making each sex fulfil its earthly mission, the standard to be adopted in measuring its relative position must be of a composite character; or, to borrow from economic language, it must be a multiple standard.  Bushido had a standard of its own and it was binomial.  It tried to guage the value of woman on the battle-field and by the hearth.  There she counted for very little; here for all.  The treatment accorded her corresponded to this double measurement;—­as a social-political unit not much, while as wife and mother she received highest respect and deepest affection.  Why among so military a nation as the Romans, were their matrons so highly venerated?  Was it not because they were matrona, mothers?  Not as fighters or law-givers, but as their mothers did men bow before them.  So with us.  While fathers and husbands were absent in field or camp, the government of the household was left entirely in the hands of mothers and wives.  The education of the young, even their defence, was entrusted to them.  The warlike exercises of women, of which I have spoken, were primarily to enable them intelligently to direct and follow the education of their children.

I have noticed a rather superficial notion prevailing among half-informed foreigners, that because the common Japanese expression for one’s wife is “my rustic wife” and the like, she is despised and held in little esteem.  When it is told that such phrases as “my foolish father,” “my swinish son,” “my awkward self,” etc., are in current use, is not the answer clear enough?

To me it seems that our idea of marital union goes in some ways further than the so-called Christian.  “Man and woman shall be one flesh.”  The individualism of the Anglo-Saxon cannot let go of the idea that husband and wife are two persons;—­hence when they disagree, their separate rights are recognized, and when they agree, they exhaust their vocabulary in all sorts of silly pet-names and—­nonsensical blandishments.  It sounds highly irrational to our ears, when a husband or wife speaks to a third party of his other half—­better or worse—­as being lovely, bright, kind, and what not.  Is it good taste to speak of one’s self as “my bright self,” “my lovely disposition,” and so forth?  We think praising one’s own wife or one’s own husband is praising a part of one’s own self, and self-praise is regarded, to say the least, as bad taste among us,—­and I hope, among Christian nations too!  I have diverged at some length because the polite debasement of one’s consort was a usage most in vogue among the samurai.