, while the
respectable business houses declined for some time the repeated requests
of the authorities to establish branch houses. Was Bushido powerless to
stay the current of commercial dishonor? Let us see.

Those who are well acquainted with our history will remember that only a
few years after our treaty ports were opened to foreign trade,
feudalism was abolished, and when with it the samurai's fiefs were taken
and bonds issued to them in compensation, they were given liberty to
invest them in mercantile transactions. Now you may ask, "Why could they
not bring their much boasted veracity into their new business relations
and so reform the old abuses?" Those who had eyes to see could not weep
enough, those who had hearts to feel could not sympathize enough, with
the fate of many a noble and honest samurai who signally and irrevocably
failed in his new and unfamiliar field of trade and industry, through
sheer lack of shrewdness in coping with his artful plebeian rival. When
we know that eighty per cent. of the business houses fail in so
industrial a country as America, is it any wonder that scarcely one
among a hundred samurai who went into trade could succeed in his new
vocation? It will be long before it will be recognized how many fortunes
were wrecked in the attempt to apply Bushido ethics to business methods;
but it was soon patent to every observing mind that the ways of wealth
were not the ways of honor. In what respects, then, were they different?

Of the three incentives to Veracity that Lecky enumerates, viz: the
industrial, the political, and the philosophical, the first was
altogether lacking in Bushido. As to the second, it could develop little
in a political community under a feudal system. It is in its
philosophical, and as Lecky says, in its highest aspect, that Honesty
attained elevated rank in our catalogue of virtues. With all my sincere
regard for the high commercial integrity of the Anglo-Saxon race, when I
ask for the ultimate ground, I am told that "Honesty is the best
policy," that it _pays_ to be honest. Is not this virtue, then, its own
reward? If it is followed because it brings in more cash than falsehood,
I am afraid Bushido would rather indulge in lies!

If Bushido rejects a doctrine of _quid pro quo_ rewards, the shrewder
tradesman will readily accept it. Lecky has very truly remarked that
Veracity owes its growth largely to commerce and manufacture; as
Nietzsche puts it, "Honesty is