igher
ideals of human worth. The weakness of heathen lands arises in no
slight degree from their cheap estimate of human life.

In Japan, until the Meiji era, human life was cheap. For criminals of
the military classes, suicide was the honorable method of leaving this
world; the lower orders of society suffered loss of life at the hands
of the military class without redress. The whole nation accepted the
low standards of human value; woman was valued chiefly, if not
entirely, on a utilitarian basis, that, namely, of bearing children,
doing house and farm work, and giving men pleasure. So far as I know,
not among all the teachings of Confucius or Buddha was the supreme
value of human life, as such, once suggested, much less any adequate
conception of the worth and nature of woman. The entire social order
was constructed without these two important truths.

By a great effort, however, Japan has introduced a new social order,
with unprecedented rapidity. By one revolution it has established a
set of laws in which the equality of all men before the law is
recognized at least; for the first time in Oriental history, woman is
given the right to seek divorce. The experiment is now being made on a
great scale as to whether the new social order adopted by the rulers
can induce those ideas among the people at large which will insure its
performance. Can the mere legal enactments which embody the principles
of human equality and the value of human life, regardless of sex,
beget those fundamental conceptions on which alone a steady and
lasting government can rest? Can Japan really step into the circle of
Western nations, without abandoning her pagan religions and pushing
onward into Christian monotheism with all its corollaries as to the
relations and mutual duties of man? All earnest men are crying out for
a strengthening of the moral life of the nation through the reform of
the family and are proclaiming the necessity of monogamy; but, aside
from the Christians, none appear to see how this is to be done. Even
Mr. Fukuzawa says that the first step in the reform of the family and
the establishment of monogamy is to develop public sentiment against
prostitution and plural or illegal marriage; and the way to do this
is first to make evil practices secret. This, he says, is more
important than to give women a higher education. He does not see that
Christianity with its conceptions of immediate responsibility of the
individual to God