imbibed from them and assimilated to itself, were few and simple. Few
and simple as these were, they were sufficient to furnish a safe conduct
of life even through the unsafest days of the most unsettled period of
our nation's history. The wholesome, unsophisticated nature of our
warrior ancestors derived ample food for their spirit from a sheaf of
commonplace and fragmentary teachings, gleaned as it were on the
highways and byways of ancient thought, and, stimulated by the demands
of the age, formed from these gleanings anew and unique type of manhood.
An acute French _savant_, M. de la Mazelière, thus sums up his
impressions of the sixteenth century:--"Toward the middle of the
sixteenth century, all is confusion in Japan, in the government, in
society, in the church. But the civil wars, the manners returning to
barbarism, the necessity for each to execute justice for himself,--these
formed men comparable to those Italians of the sixteenth century, in
whom Taine praises 'the vigorous initiative, the habit of sudden
resolutions and desperate undertakings, the grand capacity to do and to
suffer.' In Japan as in Italy 'the rude manners of the Middle Ages made
of man a superb animal, wholly militant and wholly resistant.' And this
is why the sixteenth century displays in the highest degree the
principal quality of the Japanese race, that great diversity which one
finds there between minds (_esprits_) as well as between temperaments.
While in India and even in China men seem to differ chiefly in degree of
energy or intelligence, in Japan they differ by originality of character
as well. Now, individuality is the sign of superior races and of
civilizations already developed. If we make use of an expression dear to
Nietzsche, we might say that in Asia, to speak of humanity is to speak
of its plains; in Japan as in Europe, one represents it above all by its
mountains."

To the pervading characteristics of the men of whom M. de la Mazelière