hough this general subject trenches on morality rather than on the
topic immediately before us, yet it throws a lurid light on this
question also. It lets us see, perhaps, more clearly than we could in
any other way, how deficient is the average home life of the people. A
professing Christian, a man of wide experience and social standing,
not long since seriously argued at a meeting of a Young Men's
Christian Association that dancing and singing girls are a necessary
part of Japanese civilization to-day. He argued that they supply the
men with that female element in social life which the ordinary woman
cannot provide; were the average wives and daughters sufficiently
accomplished to share in the social life of the men as they are in the
West, dancing and singing girls, being needless, would soon cease to
be.

One further question in this connection merits our attention. How are
we to account for an order of society that allows so little scope for
the natural affections of the heart, unless by saying that that order
is the true expression of their nature? Must we not say that the
element of affection in the present social order is deficient because
the Japanese themselves are naturally deficient? The question seems
more difficult than it really is.

In the first place, the affectionate relation existing between
husbands and wives and between parents and children, in Western lands,
is a product of relatively recent times. In his exhaustive work on
"The History of Human Marriage," Westermarck makes this very plain.
Wherever the woman is counted a slave, is bought and sold, is
considered as merely a means of bearing children to the family, or in
any essential way is looked down upon, there high forms of affection
are by the nature of the case impossible, though some affection
doubtless exists; it necessarily attains only a rudimentary
development. Now it is conspicuous that the conception of the nature
and purpose of woman, as held in the Orient, has always been debasing
to her. Though individual women might rise above their assigned
position the whole social order, as established by the leaders of
thought, was against her. The statement that there was a primitive
condition of society in Japan in which the affectionate relations
between husband and wife now known in the West prevailed, is, I think,
a mistake.

We must remember, in the second place, what careful students of human
evolution have pointed out, that those tr