abdicated. So in the Far East, when the head of a family has had enough
of active life, he abdicates, and his eldest son reigns in his stead.

From that moment he ceases to belong to the body politic in any active
sense. Not that he is no longer a member of society nor unamenable to
its general laws, but that he has become a respectable declasse, as it
were. He has entered, so to speak, the social nirvana, a not unfitting
first step, as he regards it, toward entering the eventual nirvana
beyond. Such abdication now takes place without particular cause. After
a certain time of life, and long before a man grows old, it is the
fashion thus to make one's bow.

Chapter 4. Language.

A man's personal equation, as astronomers call the effect of his
individuality, is kin, for all its complexity, to those simple
algebraical problems which so puzzled us at school. To solve either we
must begin by knowing the values of the constants that enter into its
expression. Upon the a b c's of the one, as upon those of the other,
depend the possibilities of the individual x.

Now the constants in any man's equation are the qualities that he has
inherited from the past. What a man does follows from what he is, which
in turn is mostly dependent upon what his ancestors have been; and
of all the links in the long chain of mind-evolution, few are more
important and more suggestive than language. Actions may at the moment
speak louder than words, but methods of expression have as tell-tale a
tongue for bygone times as ways of doing things.

If it should ever fall to my lot to have to settle that exceedingly
vexed Eastern question,--not the emancipation of ancient Greece from the
bondage of the modern Turk, but the emancipation of the modern college
student from the bond of ancient Greek,--I should propose, as a solution
of the dilemma, the addition of a course in Japanese to the college list
of required studies. It might look, I admit, like begging the question
for the sake of giving its answer, but the answer, I think, would
justify itself.

It is from no desire to parade a fresh hobby-horse upon the university
curriculum that I offer the suggestion, but because I believe that a
study of the Japanese language would prove the most valuable of ponies
in the academic pursuit of philology. In the matter of literature,
indeed, we should not be adding very much to our existing store, but we
should gain an insight into the genesis of speech