ethics of Shinto will surely endure. For Shinto signifies character in
the higher sense--courage, courtesy, honour, and above all things,
loyalty. The spirit of Shinto is the spirit of filial piety, the zest of
duty, the readiness to surrender life for a principle without a thought
of wherefore. It is the docility of the child; it is the sweetness of
the Japanese woman. It is conservatism likewise; the wholesome check
upon the national tendency to cast away the worth of the entire past in
rash eagerness to assimilate too much of the foreign present. It is
religion--but religion transformed into hereditary moral impulse--
religion transmuted into ethical instinct. It is the whole emotional
life of the race--the Soul of Japan.

The child is born Shinto. Home teaching and school training only give
expression to what is innate: they do not plant new seed; they do but
quicken the ethical sense transmitted as a trait ancestral. Even as a
Japanese infant inherits such ability to handle a writing-brush as never
can be acquired by Western fingers, so does it inherit ethical
sympathies totally different from our own. Ask a class of Japanese
students--young students of fourteen to sixteen--to tell their dearest
wishes; and if they have confidence in the questioner, perhaps nine out
of ten will answer: 'To die for His Majesty Our Emperor.' And the wish
soars from the heart pure as any wish for martyrdom ever born. How much
this sense of loyalty may or may not have been weakened in such great
centres as Tokyo by the new agnosticism and by the rapid growth of other
nineteenth-century ideas among the student class, I do not know; but in
the country it remains as natural to boyhood as joy. Unreasoning it also
is--unlike those loyal sentiments with us, the results of maturer
knowledge and settled conviction. Never does the Japanese youth ask
himself why; the beauty of self-sacrifice alone is the all-sufficing
motive. Such ecstatic loyalty is a part of the national life; it is in