As the speaker awaited my judgment on his career, I ventured to suggest that gifts, qualities and inspiration which made a man a public man did not necessarily equip him for being a great success in business life.  The question was, perhaps, whether the type of man who was pre-eminently successful in promoting his own pecuniary interests was necessarily the best type of public man.  Was the average character equal to the strain of many years of concentration on money-making to the exclusion of public interests?  When men emerged from the sphere of concentrated money-making, were they worth so very much as public men?  Might not the values of things have altered a little for them?  Might it not have a shrivelling effect on the heart to resist applications which must be refused when the strengthening of one’s financial position was regarded as the chief object in life?

At this point our host, Mr. Yamasaki, the respected principal of the big agricultural school of the prefecture and a well-known rural author and speaker, broke in with the ejaculation, “He has got a needle in your head”—­the Japanese equivalent for “touching the spot”—­and continued:  “Surely he is right who through his life offers freely what he may have as to members of his own family.  I give away many pamphlets and I have guests.  I could save in these directions.  But I am not doing it.  I am content if I can support my family.  I gave a savings book to each of my five children.  When the boy becomes twenty-one he will have enough to finish at the university or start as a small merchant so as not to be a parasite.  My girls will be provided with enough to furnish the costs of modest marriage.  If I did more I might perhaps become greedy.”

I cannot say that the farmer who had so kindly outlined his life’s programme was impressed either by our host’s views or by mine, but he told us that he now spent 5 per cent. of his income on public purposes, and that 150 yen received for giving lectures was spent on books and recreation “for enlarging mind and heart.”  He happened to mention that, though his family was of the Zen sect of Buddhism, he was a Shintoist.  It is difficult to believe that a genuine Buddhist could have evolved such a life scheme.  There is certainly a Shinto symbolism in his plan of tree planting before his house.  He has set there, in the order shown, eleven pines which he named as marked: 

[Illustration:  PLAN OF THE ELEVEN SYMBOLIC TREES WHICH THE FARMER PLANTED OUTSIDE HIS HOUSE AND THE EVILS (REPRESENTED BY ARROWS) FROM WHICH THEY ARE SHIELDING HIM]

The virtues inscribed on this plan are the guardians of the farmer and his family, which is represented in the middle of it.  The words behind the arrows represent the character of the attacks to which the farmer conceives himself and his family to be exposed.  Courage is imagined as going before and Wisdom as protecting the rear.