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The conduct most appropriate to a bushi was never embodied in a written code. It derived its sanctions from the practice of recognized models, and only by observing those models can we reach a clear conception of the thing itself.
Throughout the centuries including the present era of Meiji, it is the Shinto religion that has provided and that still provides religious sanctions for the social order even for the new social order that has come in from the West.
Our sanctions against the military dictatorship that has attempted to crush human rights in Poland and against the Soviet regime behind that military dictatorship clearly demonstrated to the world that America will not conduct "business as usual" with the forces of oppression. If the events in Poland continue to deteriorate, further measures will follow.
The smallest germs of the feeling are thus laid hold of, and nourished by the contagion of sympathy and the influences of education; and by the powerful agency of the external sanctions there is woven around it a complete web of corroborative association.
They see that merely human wisdom and human efforts cannot subvert it, except by tearing to pieces the Constitution, breaking the pledges which it sanctions, and severing into distracted fragments that common country which Providence brought into one nation, through a continued miracle of almost two hundred years, from the first settlement of the American wilderness until the Revolution.
There are no penal provisions, nor is there any evidence of promulgation with Imperial sanction. The seventeen articles are simply moral maxims, based on the teachings of Buddhism and Confucianism, and appealing to the sanctions of conscience. Prince Shotoku, in his capacity of regent, compiled them and issued them to officials in the guise of "instructions."
Still I do not see how this consideration weighs against Lord Derby's title to his lands, if the body politic has determined that on the whole it is best for the community that land should not be held equally by all, and sanctions by law Lord Derby's monopoly of a large area. The local rates in England exceed L25,000,000 annually; and the ratepayers perhaps reckon this a large enough ransom.
This difficulty belongs to every attempt to reduce morality to first principles, unless it should happen that the principle chosen has as much sacredness as any of its applications. Utility has, or might have, all the sanctions attaching to any other system of morals. Those sanctions are either External or Internal.
But a truer idea of the nature of the spiritual, united with a decay of the old supernaturalistic sanctions, will change all that. Religion will become active and militant, intensely concerned with everything human, a loyal enthusiasm for all the significant phases of life.
The first speaker can talk of this earth, the scene of the peasant's labors, while the priest is bound to talk to him of heaven, with which, unfortunately, the peasant nowadays concerns himself very little indeed; I say unfortunately, because the doctrine of a future life is not only a consolation, but a means by which men may be governed. Is not religion the one power that sanctions social laws?
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