up my mind
that though they cut me, I will not cut. Yes, yes! some people are truly
like fleas and mosquitoes and they bite--but what does their biting
amount to? It itches a little, that's all; it won't endanger life."
These are the words of one whose Bushido training was tried in the fiery
furnace of adversity and triumph. The popular apothegm--"To be beaten is
to conquer," meaning true conquest consists in not opposing a riotous
foe; and "The best won victory is that obtained without shedding of
blood," and others of similar import--will show that after all the
ultimate ideal of knighthood was Peace.

It was a great pity that this high ideal was left exclusively to priests
and moralists to preach, while the samurai went on practicing and
extolling martial traits. In this they went so far as to tinge the
ideals of womanhood with Amazonian character. Here we may profitably
devote a few paragraphs to the subject of

THE TRAINING AND POSITION OF
WOMAN.

The female half of our species has sometimes been called the paragon of
paradoxes, because the intuitive working of its mind is beyond the
comprehension of men's "arithmetical understanding." The Chinese
ideogram denoting "the mysterious," "the unknowable," consists of two
parts, one meaning "young" and the other "woman," because the physical
charms and delicate thoughts of the fair sex are above the coarse mental
calibre of our sex to explain.

In the Bushido ideal of woman, however, there is little mystery and only
a seeming paradox. I have said that it was Amazonian, but that is only
half the truth. Ideographically the Chinese represent wife by a woman
holding a broom--certainly not to brandish it offensively or defensively
against her conjugal ally, neither for witchcraft, but for the more
harmless uses for which the besom was first invented--the idea involved
being thus not less homely than the etymological derivation of the
English wife (weaver) and daughter (_duhitar_, milkmaid). Without
confining the sphere of woman's activity to _Kueche, Kirche, Kinder_, as
the present German Kaiser is said to do, the Bushido ideal of womanhood
was preeminently domestic. These seeming contradictions--Domesticity and
Amazonian traits--are not inconsistent with the Precepts of Knighthood,
as we shall see.

Bushido being a teaching primarily intended for the masculine sex, the
virtues it prized in woman were naturally far from being distinctly
feminine. Winckelmann remar