mals, caring for dead bodies,
tanning skins, and other employments which rendered them unclean
according to the old notions. From very early times the agricultural
class has been sharply divided from the samurai or military. Here and
there one from the peasantry mounts by force of his personal qualities
into the higher ranks, for there is no caste system that prevents the
passing from one class into another,--only a class prejudice that serves
very nearly the same purpose, in keeping samurai and heimin in their
places, that the race prejudice in this country serves in confining the
negroes, North and South, to certain positions and occupations. The
first division of the military from the peasantry occurred in the eighth
century, and since then the peculiar circumstances of each class have
tended to produce quite different characteristics in persons originally
of the same stock. To the soldier class have fallen learning, skill in
arms and horsemanship, opportunities to rise to places of honor and
power, lives free from sordid care in regard to the daily rice, and in
which noble ideas of duty and loyalty can spring up and bear fruit in
heroic deeds. To the peasant, tilling his little rice-field year after
year, have come the heavy burdens of taxation; the grinding toil for a
mere pittance of food for himself and his family; the patient bearing of
all things imposed by his superiors, with little hope of gain for
himself, whatever change the fortunes of war may bring to those above
him in the social scale. Is there wonder that, as the years have gone
by, his wits have grown heavy under his daily drudgery; that he knows
little and understands less of the changes that are taking place in his
native land; that he is easily moved by only one thing, and that the
failure of his crops, or the shortening of his returns from his land by
heavier taxation? This is true of the heimin as a class: they are
conservative, fearing that change will but tend to make harder a lot
that is none too easy; and though peaceable and gentle usually, they may
be moved to blind acts of riot and bloodshed by any political change
that seems likely to produce heavier taxation, or even by a failure of
their crops, when they see themselves and their families starving while
the military and official classes have enough and to spare. But though,
as a class, the farmers are ignorant and heavy, they are seldom entirely
illiterate; and everywhere, throughout the c