se languages--the former mis-pronounced and in
sound bearing as much resemblance to Pekingise speech as "Pennsylvania
Dutch" does to the language of Berlin. Everything like thinking and
study must be with a view of sustaining and maintaining the established
order of things. The tree of education, instead of being a lofty or
wide-spreading cryptomeria, must be the measured nursling of the teacup.
If that trio of emblems, so admired by the natives, the bamboo, pine and
plum, could produce glossy leaves, ever-green needles and fragrant
blooms within a space of four cubic inches, so the law, the literature
and the art of Japan must display their normal limit of fresh fragrance,
of youthful vigor and of venerable age, enduring for aye, within the
vessel of Japanese inclusion so carefully limited by the Yedo
authorities.

Such a policy, reminds one of the Amherst agricultural experiment in
which bands of iron were strapped around a much-afflicted squash, in
order to test vital potency. It recalls the pretty little story of
Picciola, in which a tender plant must grow between the interstices of
the bricks in a prison yard. Besides the potent bonds of the only
orthodox Confucian philosophy which was allowed and the legally
recognized religions, there was gradually formed a marvellous system of
legislation, that turned the whole nation into a secret society in which
spies and hypocrites flourished like fungus on a dead log. Besides the
unwritten code of private law,[4] that is, the local and general customs
founded on immemorial usage, there was that peculiar legal system framed
by Iyeyas[)u], bequeathed as a legacy and for over two hundred years
practically the supreme law of the land.

What this law was, it was exceedingly difficult, if not utterly
impossible, for the aliens dwelling in the country at Nagasaki ever to
find out. Keenly intellectual, as many of the physicians,
superintendents and elect members of the Dutch trading company were,
they seem never to have been able to get hold of what has been called
"The Testament of Iyeyas[)u]."[5] This consisted of one hundred laws or
regulations, based on a home-spun sort of Confucianism, intended to be
orthodoxy "unbroken for ages eternal."

To a man of western mode of thinking, the most astonishing thing is that
this law was esoteric.[6] The people knew of it only by its irresistible
force, and by the constant pressure or the rare easing of its iron hand.
Those who executed