above” is “without partiality.”  The Chinese ethical system, however, disregards the principle of mutual rights and duties, and builds up the family on the theory of the subordination of the younger brother to the elder brother, the predominant idea being not mutual love, but, far more than in the Christian household, that of rank and order.  The attitude of the heir of the family toward the other children is one of condescension, and they, as well as the widowed mother, regard the oldest son with reverence.  It is as though the commandment given on Sinai should read, “Honor thy father and thy elder brother.”

The mother is an instrument rather than a person in the life of the house, and the older brother is the one on whom rests the responsibility of continuing the family line.  The younger brothers serve as subjects for adoption into other families, especially those where there are daughters to be married and family names to be continued.  In a word, the name belongs to the house and not to the individual.  The habit of naming children after relatives or friends of the parents, or illustrious men and women, is unknown in Old Japan, though an approach to this common custom among us is made by conferring or making use of part of a name, usually by the transferrence of one ideograph forming the name-word.  Such a practice lays stress upon personality, and so has no place in the country without pronouns, where the idea of continuing the personal house or semi-personal family, is predominant.  The customs prevalent in life are strong even in death, and the elder brother or sister, in some provinces, did not go to the funeral of the younger.  This state of affairs is reflected in Japanese literature, and produces in romance as well as in history many situations and episodes which seem almost incredible to the Western mind.

In the lands ruled by Confucius the grown-up children usually live under the parental roof, and there are few independent homes as we understand them.  The so-called family is composed both of the living and of the dead, and constitutes the unit of society.

Friendship and Humanity.

The Fifth Relation—­Friends.  Here, again, a mistake is often made by those who import ideas of Christendom into the terms used in Chinese Asia, and who strive to make exact equivalent in exchanging the coins of speech.  Occidental writers are prone to translate the term for the fifth relation into the English phrase “man to man,” which leads the Western reader to suppose that Confucius taught that universal love for man, as man, which was instilled and exemplified by Jesus Christ.  In translating Confucius they often make the same mistake that some have done who read in Terence’s “Self-Tormentor” the line, “I am a man, and nothing human is foreign to me,"[29] and imagine that this is the sentiment of an enlightened Christian, although the context shows that it is only the boast of a busybody and parasite.  What Confucius