with work, those ignorant of any handicraft being employed
as labourers. The inmates were fed and clothed by the Government, and
set free after three years, their savings being handed to them to
serve as capital for some occupation. The institution was placed
under the care of Hasegawa Heizo, five hundred bags of rice and five
hundred ryo being granted annually by the Bakufu for its support.

ADOPTION

It has been stated above that one of the abuses which came into large
practice from the middle period of the Tokugawa Bakufu was the
adoption of children of ignoble birth into samurai families in
consideration of monetary payments by their parents. This mercenary
custom was strictly interdicted by the Matsudaira regent, who justly
saw in it a danger to the solidity of the military class. But it does
not appear that his veto received full observance.

EDUCATION

Since the shogun Tsunayoshi (1680-1709) appointed Hayashi Nobuatsu as
chief of Education in Yedo, and entrusted to him the conduct of the
college called Seido, Hayashi's descendants succeeded to that post by
hereditary right. They steadily followed the principles of
Confucianism as interpreted by Chutsz, a Chinese philosopher who died
in the year 1200, but in accordance with the inevitable fate of all
hereditary offices, the lapse of generations brought inferiority of
zeal and talent. During the first half of the seventeenth century,
there appeared in the field of Japanese philosophy Nakaye Toju, who
adopted the interpretation of Confucianism given by a later Chinese
philosopher, Wang Yang-ming (1472-1529). At a subsequent date Yamaga
Soko, Ito Jinsai, and Ogyu Sorai (called also Butsu Sorai) asserted
the superiority of the ancient Chinese teaching; and finally
Kinoshita Junan preached the rule of adopting whatever was good,
without distinction of Tang or Sung.

These four schools engaged in vehement controversy, and showed such
passion in their statements and such intolerance in their
contradictions, that they seemed to have altogether forgotten the
ethical principles underlying their own doctrines. In the last
quarter of the eighteenth century, other schools came into being, one
calling itself the "eclectic school," another the "inductive school,"
and so forth, so that in the end one and the same passage of the
Confucian Analects received some twenty different interpretations,
all advanced with more or less abuse and injury to the spirit of
politeness.