ire of ambition; his mind is athirst for
knowledge. Penury is only a stimulus to drive him onward; worldly goods
are in his sight shackles to his character. He is the repository of
Loyalty and Patriotism. He is the self-imposed guardian of national
honor. With all his virtues and his faults, he is the last fragment of
Bushido.

Deep-rooted and powerful as is still the effect of Bushido, I have said
that it is an unconscious and mute influence. The heart of the people
responds, without knowing the reason why, to any appeal made to what it
has inherited, and hence the same moral idea expressed in a newly
translated term and in an old Bushido term, has a vastly different
degree of efficacy. A backsliding Christian, whom no pastoral persuasion
could help from downward tendency, was reverted from his course by an
appeal made to his loyalty, the fidelity he once swore to his Master.
The word "Loyalty" revived all the noble sentiments that were permitted
to grow lukewarm. A band of unruly youths engaged in a long continued
"students' strike" in a college, on account of their dissatisfaction
with a certain teacher, disbanded at two simple questions put by the
Director,--"Is your professor a blameless character? If so, you ought
to respect him and keep him in the school. Is he weak? If so, it is not
manly to push a falling man." The scientific incapacity of the
professor, which was the beginning of the trouble, dwindled into
insignificance in comparison with the moral issues hinted at. By
arousing the sentiments nurtured by Bushido, moral renovation of great
magnitude can be accomplished.

One cause of the failure of mission work is that most of the
missionaries are grossly ignorant of our history--"What do we care for
heathen records?" some say--and consequently estrange their religion
from the habits of thought we and our forefathers have been accustomed
to for centuries past. Mocking a nation's history!--as though the career
of any people--even of the lowest African savages possessing no
record--were not a page in the general history of mankind, written by
the hand of God Himself. The very lost races are a palimpsest to be
deciphered by a seeing eye. To a philosophic and pious mind, the races
themselves are marks of Divine chirography clearly traced in black and
white as on their skin; and if this simile holds good, the yellow race
forms a precious page inscribed in hieroglyphics of gold! Ignoring the
past career of a peopl