imply preposterous. Why should
he adopt another line of business? And, if he did, what other business
should he adopt? Is his father's occupation not already there, a part
of the existing order of things; and is he not the son of his father and
heir therefore of the paternal skill? Not that such inherited aptness is
recognized scientifically; it is simply taken for granted instinctively.
It is but a halfhearted intuition, however, for the possibility of an
inheritance from the mother's side is as out of the question as if her
severance from her own family had an ex post facto effect. As for
his individual predilection in the matter, nature has considerately
conformed to custom by giving him none. He becomes a cabinet-maker,
for instance, because his ancestors always have been cabinet-makers. He
inherits the family business as a necessary part of the family name. He
is born to his trade, not naturally selected because of his fitness for
it. But he usually is amply qualified for the position, for generations
of practice, if only on one side of the house, accumulate a vast deal
of technical skill. The result of this system of clan guilds in all
branches of industry is sufficiently noticeable. The almost infinite
superiority of Japanese artisans over their European fellow-craftsmen
is world-known. On the other hand the tendency of the occupation in the
abstract to swallow up the individual in the concrete is as evident to
theory as it is patent in practice. Eventually the man is lost in the
manner. The very names of trades express the fact. The Japanese word for
cabinet-maker, for example, means literally cutting-thing-house, and
is now applied as distinctively to the man as to his shop. Nominally as
well as practically the youthful Japanese artisan makes his introduction
to the world, much after the manner of the hero of Lecocq's comic opera,
the son of the house of Marasquin et Cie.

If instead of belonging to the lower middle class our typical youth be
born of bluer blood, or if he be filled with the same desires as if he
were so descended, he becomes a student. Having failed to discover in
the school-room the futility of his country's self-vaunted learning, he
proceeds to devote his life to its pursuit. With an application which
is eminently praiseworthy, even if its object be not, he sets to work to
steep himself in the classics till he can perceive no merit in anything
else. As might be suspected, he ends by discoverin