father's rebellious conduct. "If I
be loyal, my father must be undone; if I obey my father, my duty to my
sovereign must go amiss." Poor Shigemori! We see him afterward praying
with all his soul that kind Heaven may visit him with death, that he may
be released from this world where it is hard for purity and
righteousness to dwell.

Many a Shigemori has his heart torn by the conflict between duty and
affection. Indeed neither Shakespeare nor the Old Testament itself
contains an adequate rendering of _ko_, our conception of filial piety,
and yet in such conflicts Bushido never wavered in its choice of
Loyalty. Women, too, encouraged their offspring to sacrifice all for the
king. Ever as resolute as Widow Windham and her illustrious consort, the
samurai matron stood ready to give up her boys for the cause of Loyalty.

Since Bushido, like Aristotle and some modern sociologists, conceived
the state as antedating the individual--the latter being born into the
former as part and parcel thereof--he must live and die for it or for
the incumbent of its legitimate authority. Readers of Crito will
remember the argument with which Socrates represents the laws of the
city as pleading with him on the subject of his escape. Among others he
makes them (the laws, or the state) say:--"Since you were begotten and
nurtured and educated under us, dare you once to say you are not our
offspring and servant, you and your fathers before you!" These are words
which do not impress us as any thing extraordinary; for the same thing
has long been on the lips of Bushido, with this modification, that the
laws and the state were represented with us by a personal being. Loyalty
is an ethical outcome of this political theory.

I am not entirely ignorant of Mr. Spencer's view according to which
political obedience--Loyalty--is accredited with only a transitional
function.[18] It may be so. Sufficient unto the day is the virtue
thereof. We may complacently repeat it, especially as we believe _that_
day to be a long space of time, during which, so our national anthem
says, "tiny pebbles grow into mighty rocks draped with moss." We may
remember at this juncture that even among so democratic a people as the
English, "the sentiment of personal fidelity to a man and his posterity
which their Germanic ancestors felt for their chiefs, has," as Monsieur
Boutmy recently said, "only passed more or less into their profound
loyalty to the race and blood of their pr