The child still cried silently. The officer raised the shaking
criminal; the dumb crowd parted left and right to let them by.
Then, quite suddenly, the whole multitude began to sob. And as
the bronzed guardian passed, I saw what I had never seen before,
--what few men ever see,--what I shall probably never see again,
--the tears of a Japanese policeman.

The crowd ebbed, and left me musing on the strange morality of
the spectacle. Here was justice unswerving yet compassionate,--
forcing knowledge of a crime by the pathetic witness of its
simplest result. Here was desperate remorse, praying only for
pardon before death. And here was a populace--perhaps the most
dangerous in the Empire when angered--comprehending all, touched
by all, satisfied with the contrition and the shame, and filled,
not with wrath, but only with the great sorrow of the
sin,--through simple deep experience of the difficulties of life
and the weaknesses of human nature.

But the most significant, because the most Oriental, fact of the
episode was that the appeal to remorse had been made through the
criminal's sense of fatherhood,--that potential love of children
which is so large a part of the soul of every Japanese.

There is a story that the most famous of all Japanese robbers,
Ishikawa Goemon, once by night entering a house to kill and
steal, was charmed by the smile of a baby which reached out hands
to him, and that he remained playing with the little creature
until all chance of carrying out his purpose was lost.