of
translators can do them but scant justice, not to say positive injustice
and grievance. Who can improve by translation what the German "_Gemueth_"
signifies, or who does not feel the difference between the two words
verbally so closely allied as the English _gentleman_ and the French
_gentilhomme_?

Bushido, then, is the code of moral principles which the knights were
required or instructed to observe. It is not a written code; at best it
consists of a few maxims handed down from mouth to mouth or coming from
the pen of some well-known warrior or savant. More frequently it is a
code unuttered and unwritten, possessing all the more the powerful
sanction of veritable deed, and of a law written on the fleshly tablets
of the heart. It was founded not on the creation of one brain, however
able, or on the life of a single personage, however renowned. It was an
organic growth of decades and centuries of military career. It, perhaps,
fills the same position in the history of ethics that the English
Constitution does in political history; yet it has had nothing to
compare with the Magna Charta or the Habeas Corpus Act. True, early in
the seventeenth century Military Statutes (_Buke Hatto_) were
promulgated; but their thirteen short articles were taken up mostly with
marriages, castles, leagues, etc., and didactic regulations were but
meagerly touched upon. We cannot, therefore, point out any definite time
and place and say, "Here is its fountain head." Only as it attains
consciousness in the feudal age, its origin, in respect to time, may be
identified with feudalism. But feudalism itself is woven of many
threads, and Bushido shares its intricate nature. As in England the
political institutions of feudalism may be said to date from the Norman
Conquest, so we may say that in Japan its rise was simultaneous with the
ascendency of Yoritomo, late in the twelfth century. As, however, in
England, we find the social elements of feudalism far back in the period
previous to William the Conqueror, so, too, the germs of feudalism in
Japan had been long existent before the period I have mentioned.

Again, in Japan as in Europe, when feudalism was formally inaugurated,
the professional class of warriors naturally came into prominence. These
were known as _samurai_, meaning literally, like the old English _cniht_
(knecht, knight), guards or attendants--resembling in character the
_soldurii_ whom Caesar mentioned as existing in Aquitania,