as administered by
a lower kind of samurai or by priests. Every thinking bushi knew well
enough that money formed the sinews of war; but he did not think of
raising the appreciation of money to a virtue. It is true that thrift
was enjoined by Bushido, but not for economical reasons so much as for
the exercise of abstinence. Luxury was thought the greatest menace to
manhood, and severest simplicity was required of the warrior class,
sumptuary laws being enforced in many of the clans.

We read that in ancient Rome the farmers of revenue and other financial
agents were gradually raised to the rank of knights, the State thereby
showing its appreciation of their service and of the importance of money
itself. How closely this was connected with the luxury and avarice of
the Romans may be imagined. Not so with the Precepts of Knighthood.
These persisted in systematically regarding finance as something
low--low as compared with moral and intellectual vocations.

Money and the love of it being thus diligently ignored, Bushido itself
could long remain free from a thousand and one evils of which money is
the root. This is sufficient reason for the fact that our public men
have long been free from corruption; but, alas, how fast plutocracy is
making its way in our time and generation!

The mental discipline which would now-a-days be chiefly aided by the
study of mathematics, was supplied by literary exegesis and
deontological discussions. Very few abstract subjects troubled the mind
of the young, the chief aim of their education being, as I have said,
decision of character. People whose minds were simply stored with
information found no great admirers. Of the three services of studies
that Bacon gives,--for delight, ornament, and ability,--Bushido had
decided preference for the last, where their use was "in judgment and
the disposition of business." Whether it was for the disposition of
public business or for the exercise of self-control, it was with a
practical end in view that education was conducted. "Learning without
thought," said Confucius, "is labor lost: thought without learning is
perilous."

When character and not intelligence, when the soul and not the head, is
chosen by a teacher for the material to work upon and to develop, his
vocation partakes of a sacred character. "It is the parent who has borne
me: it is the teacher who makes me man." With this idea, therefore, the
esteem in which one's preceptor was held was