every day in the week. For no occasion is lost by the
erudite authors, even in the most worldly portions of their work,
for preaching a slight homily on the subject in hand. The dictum of
Dionysius of Halicarnassus that "history is philosophy teaching by
example" would seem there to have become modified into "history is
filiosophy teaching by example." For in the instructive anecdotes every
other form of merit is depicted as second to that of being a dutiful
son. To the practice of that supreme virtue all other considerations are
sacrificed. The student's aim is thus kept single. At every turn of the
leaves, paragons of filial piety shame the youthful reader to the pitch
of emulation by the epitaphic records of their deeds. Portraits of the
past, possibly colored, present that estimable trait in so exalted
a type that to any less filial a people they would simply deter
competition. Yet the boy implicitly believes and no doubt resolves to
rival what he reads. A specimen or two will amply suggest the rest. In
one tale the hero is held up to the unqualified admiration of posterity
for having starved to death his son, in an extreme case of family
destitution, for the sake of providing food enough for his aged father.
In another he unhesitatingly divorces his wife for having dared to poke
fun, in the shape of bodkins, at some wooden effigies of his parents
which he had had set up in the house for daily devotional contemplation.
Finally another paragon actually sells himself in perpetuity as a slave
that he may thus procure the wherewithal to bury with due honor his
anything but worthy progenitor, who had first cheated his neighbors and
then squandered his ill-gotten gains in riotous living. Of these tales,
as of certain questionable novels in a slightly different line, the
eventual moral is considered quite competent to redeem the general
immorality of the plot.

Along such a curriculum the youthful Chinaman is made to run. A very
similar system prevails in Japan, the difference between the two
consisting in quantity rather than quality. The books in the two cases
are much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly little when
we consider that in the one case it is his own classics the student is
reading, in the other the Chinaman's.

If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling is over he is
set to learn his father's trade. To undertake to learn any trade but his
father's would strike the family as s