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His conscience he followed, alive; his country he served, dying. Alack the day when a state grows so powerful as to demand of its citizens the dictates of their conscience! Bushido did not require us to make our conscience the slave of any lord or king. Thomas Mowbray was a veritable spokesman for us when he said: "Myself I throw, dread sovereign, at thy foot.
"God has granted," says the Koran, "to every people a prophet in its own tongue." The seeds of the Kingdom, as vouched for and apprehended by the Japanese mind, blossomed in Bushido.
A subject of study which one would expect to find in military education and which is rather conspicuous by its absence in the Bushido course of instruction, is mathematics. This, however, can be readily explained in part by the fact that feudal warfare was not carried on with scientific precision. Not only that, but the whole training of the samurai was unfavorable to fostering numerical notions.
The character which Bushido stamped on our nation and on the samurai in particular, cannot be said to form "an irreducible element of species," but nevertheless as to the vitality which it retains there is no doubt. Were Bushido a mere physical force, the momentum it has gained in the last seven hundred years could not stop so abruptly.
The scientific incapacity of the professor, which was the beginning of the trouble, dwindled into insignificance in comparison with the moral issues hinted at. By arousing the sentiments nurtured by Bushido, moral renovation of great magnitude can be accomplished.
Their success was due to observing frugality, treating the people with kindness, meting out strict justice, and faithfully obeying the ancestral behest to abstain from seeking high titles." They took the substance and discarded the shadow. The bushido that they developed became a model in later ages, especially in the sixteenth century.
Even in the present reign the most glorious in Japanese history there have been two rebellions, during one of which a rival Emperor was set up in one part of the country, and a republic proclaimed in another. As for Bushido, so modern a thing is it that neither Kaempfer, Siebold, Satow, nor Rein all men knowing their Japan by heart ever once allude to it in their voluminous writings.
He learned that those bred in sight of cathedrals in the civilization of the epic poem can surpass without any inspiration of oriental fatalism or religious fanaticism the courage of the land of Shintoism and Bushido. In most places the charge reached the German trenches.
The question that concerns us most is, however, Did Bushido justify the promiscuous use of the weapon? The answer is unequivocally, no! As it laid great stress on its proper use, so did it denounce and abhor its misuse. A dastard or a braggart was he who brandished his weapon on undeserved occasions. A self-possessed man knows the right time to use it, and such times come but rarely.
These are but a few of the numerous examples which tend to confirm the moral identity of the human species, notwithstanding an attempt so assiduously made to render the distinction between Christian and Pagan as great as possible. We have thus seen that the Bushido institution of suicide was neither so irrational nor barbarous as its abuse strikes us at first sight.
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