they must buy and read faithfully through at least one
book that has been published during the past five years, and the only
intervention with private choice in that matter is the prescription of
a certain minimum of length for the monthly book or books. But the full
rule in these minor compulsory matters is voluminous and detailed,
and it abounds with alternatives. Its aim is rather to keep before the
Samurai by a number of simple duties, as it were, the need of and some
of the chief methods towards health of body and mind rather than
to provide a comprehensive rule, and to ensure the maintenance of a
community of feeling and interests among the Samurai through habit,
intercourse and a living contemporary literature. These minor
obligations do not earmark more than an hour in the day. Yet they
serve to break down isolations of sympathy, all sorts of physical and
intellectual sluggishness and the development of unsocial preoccupations
of many sorts...

"So far as the Samurai have a purpose in common in maintaining the State
and the order and discipline of the world, so far, by their discipline
and denial, by their public work and effort, they worship God together.
But the ultimate fount of motives lies in the individual life, it lies
in silent and deliberate reflections, and at this the most striking of
all the rules of the Samurai aims. For seven consecutive days of the
year, at least, each man or woman under the Rule must go right out of
all the life of men into some wild and solitary place, must speak to no
man or woman 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