moral life that has hardly been excelled anywhere.  I have repeatedly been assured that if a youth of either sex were known to have transgressed the law of chastity, he or she would at once be ostracised; and that such transgressions were, consequently, exceedingly rare.  It is certainly a fact that in the vast majority of the interior towns there have never, until recent times, been licensed houses of prostitution.  Of late there has been a marked increase of dancing and singing girls, of whom it is commonly said that they are but “secret prostitutes.”  These may to-day be found in almost every town and village, wherever indeed there is a hotel.  Public as well as secret prostitution has enormously increased during the last thirty or forty years.[BN]

Thanks to Mr. Murphy’s consecrated energy, the appalling legalized and hopeless slavery under which these two classes of girls exist is at last coming to light.  He has shown, by several test cases, that although the national laws are good to look at they are powerless because set aside by local police regulations over which the courts are powerless!  In September, 1900, however, in large part due no doubt to the facts made public by him, and backed up by the public press, and such leaders of Japan’s progressive elements as Shimada Sabur, the police regulations were modified, and with amazing results.  Whereas, previous to that date, the average monthly suicides throughout the land among the public prostitutes were between forty and fifty, during the two months of September and October there were none!  In that same period, out of about five thousand prostitutes in the city of Tokyo, 492 had fled from their brothels and declared their intentions of abandoning the “shameful business,” as the Japanese laws call it, and in consequence a prominent brothel had been compelled to stop the business!  We are only in the first flush of this new reform as these lines are written, so cannot tell what end the whole movement will reach.  But the conscience of the nation is beginning to waken on this matter and we are confident it will never tolerate the old slavery of the past, enforced as it was by local laws, local courts, so that girls were always kept in debt, and when they fled were seized and forced back to the brothels in order to pay their debts!

But in contrast to the undoubted ideal of Old Japan in regard to the chastity of women, must be set the equally undoubted fact that the sages have very little to say on the subject of chastity for men.  Indeed there is no word in the Japanese language corresponding to our term “chastity” which may be applied equally to men and women.  In his volume entitled “Kokoro,” Mr. Hearn charges the missionaries with the assertion that there is no word for chastity in Japanese.  “This,” he says, “is true in the same sense only that we might say that there is no word for chastity in the English language, because such words as honor, virtue, purity, chastity