have become modified into "history is filiosophy teaching by
example." For in the instructive anecdotes every other form of merit
is depicted as second to that of being a dutiful son. To the
practice of that supreme virtue all other considerations are
sacrificed. The student's aim is thus kept single. At every turn
of the leaves, paragons of filial piety shame the youthful reader to
the pitch of emulation by the epitaphic records of their deeds.
Portraits of the past, possibly colored, present that estimable
trait in so exalted a type that to any less filial a people they
would simply deter competition. Yet the boy implicitly believes and
no doubt resolves to rival what he reads. A specimen or two will
amply suggest the rest. In one tale the hero is held up to the
unqualified admiration of posterity for having starved to death his
son, in an extreme case of family destitution, for the sake of
providing food enough for his aged father. In another he
unhesitatingly divorces his wife for having dared to poke fun, in
the shape of bodkins, at some wooden effigies of his parents which
he had had set up in the house for daily devotional contemplation.
Finally another paragon actually sells himself in perpetuity as a
slave that he may thus procure the wherewithal to bury with due
honor his anything but worthy progenitor, who had first cheated his
neighbors and then squandered his ill-gotten gains in riotous living.
Of these tales, as of certain questionable novels in a slightly
different line, the eventual moral is considered quite competent to
redeem the general immorality of the plot.

Along such a curriculum the youthful Chinaman is made to run.
A very similar system prevails in Japan, the difference between the
two consisting in quantity rather than quality. The books in the
two cases are much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly