l force, the momentum it has gained in the
last seven hundred years could not stop so abruptly. Were it
transmitted only by heredity, its influence must be immensely
widespread. Just think, as M. Cheysson, a French economist, has
calculated, that supposing there be three generations in a century,
"each of us would have in his veins the blood of at least twenty
millions of the people living in the year 1000 A.D." The merest peasant
that grubs the soil, "bowed by the weight of centuries," has in his
veins the blood of ages, and is thus a brother to us as much as "to the
ox."

An unconscious and irresistible power, Bushido has been moving the
nation and individuals. It was an honest confession of the race when
Yoshida Shoin, one of the most brilliant pioneers of Modern Japan, wrote
on the eve of his execution the following stanza;--

"Full well I knew this course must end in death;
It was Yamato spirit urged me on
To dare whate'er betide."

Unformulated, Bushido was and still is the animating spirit, the motor
force of our country.

Mr. Ransome says that "there are three distinct Japans in existence
side by side to-day,--the old, which has not wholly died out; the new,
hardly yet born except in spirit; and the transition, passing now
through its most critical throes." While this is very true in most
respects, and particularly as regards tangible and concrete
institutions, the statement, as applied to fundamental ethical notions,
requires some modification; for Bushido, the maker and product of Old
Japan, is still the guiding principle of the transition and will prove
the formative force of the new era.

The great statesmen who steered the ship of our state through the
hurricane of the Restoration and the whirlpool of national rejuvenation,
were men who knew no other moral teaching than the Precepts of
Knighthood. Some writers[30] have lately tried to prove that the
Christian missionaries contributed an appreciable quota to the making
of New Japan. I would fain render honor to whom honor is due: but this
honor can hardly be accorded to the good missionaries. More fitting it
will be to their profession to stick to the scriptural injunction of
preferring one another in honor, than to advance a claim in which they
have no proofs to back them. For myself, I believe that Christian
missionaries are doing great things for Japan--in the domain of
education, and especially of moral education:--only, the mysterio