“These Samurai form the real body of the State.  All this time that I have spent going to and fro in this planet, it has been growing upon me that this order of men and women, wearing such a uniform as you wear, and with faces strengthened by discipline and touched with devotion, is the Utopian reality; that but for them the whole fabric of these fair appearances would crumble and tarnish, shrink and shrivel, until at last, back I should be amidst the grime and disorders of the life of earth.  Tell me about these Samurai, who remind me of Plato’s guardians, who look like Knight Templars, who bear a name that recalls the swordsmen of Japan.  What are they?  Are they an hereditary cast, a specially educated order, an elected class?  For, certainly, this world turns upon them as a door upon its hinges.”

His informant explains:—­

“Practically the whole of the responsible rule of the world is in their hands; all our head teachers and disciplinary heads of colleges, our judges, barristers, employers of labour beyond a certain limit, practising medical men, legislators, must be Samurai, and all the executive committees and so forth, that play so large a part in our affairs, are drawn by lot exclusively from them.  The order is not hereditary—­we know just enough of biology and the uncertainties of inheritance to know how silly that would be—­and it does not require an early consecration or novitiate or ceremonies and initiations of that sort.  The Samurai are, in fact, volunteers.  Any intelligent adult in a reasonably healthy and efficient state may, at any age after five and twenty, become one of the Samurai and take a hand in the universal control.”

“Provided he follows the Rule.”

“Precisely—­provided he follows the Rule.”

“I have heard the phrase, ‘voluntary nobility.’”

“That was the idea of our Founders.  They made a noble and privileged order—­open to the whole world.  No one could complain of an unjust exclusion, for the only thing that could exclude them from the order was unwillingness or inability to follow the Rule.

“The Rule aims to exclude the dull and base altogether, to discipline the impulses and emotions, to develop a moral habit and sustain a man in periods of stress, fatigue and temptation, to produce the maximum co-operation of all men of good-intent, and in fact to keep all the Samurai in a state of moral and bodily health and efficiency.  It does as much of this as well as it can, but of course, like all general propositions, it does not do it in any case with absolute precision.  At first in the militant days, it was A trifle hard and uncompromising; it had rather too strong an appeal to the moral prig and the harshly righteous man, but it has undergone, and still undergoes, revision and expansion, and every year it becomes a little better adapted to the need of a general rule of life that all men may try to follow.  We have now a whole literature with many very fine things in it, written about the Rule.