and have no sort of intercourse with mankind.  They must go bookless and weaponless, without pen or paper or money.  Provision must be taken for the period of the journey, a rug or sleeping sack—­for they must sleep under the open sky—­but no means of making a fire.  They may study maps before to guide them, showing any difficulties and dangers in the journey, but they may not carry such helps.  They must not go by beaten ways or wherever there are inhabited houses, but into the bare, quiet places of the globe—­the regions set apart for them.

“This discipline was invented to secure a certain stoutness of heart and body in the Samurai.  Otherwise the order might have lain open to too many timorous, merely abstemious men and women.  Many things had been suggested, sword-play and tests that verged on torture, climbing in giddy places and the like, before this was chosen.  Partly, it is to ensure good training and sturdiness of body and mind, but partly also, it is to draw the minds of the Samurai for a space from the insistent details of life, from the intricate arguments and the fretting effort to work, from personal quarrels and personal affections and the things of the heated room.  Out they must go, clean out of the world...”

These passages will at least serve to present the Samurai idea and the idea of common Rule of conduct it embodied.

In the “Modern Utopia” I discuss also a lesser Rule and the modification of the Rule for women and the relation to the order of what I call the poietic types, those types whose business in life seems to be rather to experience and express than to act and effectually do.  For those things I must refer the reader to the book itself.  Together with a sentence I have put in italics above, they serve to show that even when I was devising these Samurai I was not unmindful of the defects that are essential to such a scheme.

This dream of the Samurai proved attractive to a much more various group of readers than the New Republican suggestion, and there have been actual attempts to realise the way of life proposed.  In most of these cases there was manifest a disposition greatly to over-accentuate organization, to make too much of the disciplinary side of the Rule and to forget the entire subordination of such things to active thought and constructive effort.  They are valuable and indeed only justifiable as a means to an end.  These attempts of a number of people of very miscellaneous origins and social traditions to come together and work like one machine made the essential wastefulness of any terrestrial realization of my Samurai very clear.  The only reason for such an Order is the economy and development of force, and under existing conditions disciplines would consume more force than they would engender.  The Order, so far from being a power, would be an isolation.  Manifestly the elements of organization and uniformity were overdone in my Utopia; in this matter I was nearer the truth in the case of my New