alone projecting above the
surface of the ground. The Emperor Suijin Tenno, on hearing the
continuous wailing day after day of the slowly dying retainers, was
touched with pity and said that it was a dreadful custom to bury with
the master those who had been most faithful to him when alive. And he
added that an evil custom, even though ancient, should not be
followed, and ordered it to be abandoned. A later record informs us
that from this time arose the custom of burying images in the place of
servants. According to the ordinary Japanese chronology, this took
place in the year corresponding to 1 B.C. The laws of Ieyasu (1610
A.D.) likewise condemn this custom as unreasonable, together with the
custom in accordance with which the retainers committed suicide upon
the master's death. These same laws also refer to the proverb on
revenge, given in the third paragraph of this chapter, and add that
whoever undertakes thus to avenge himself or his father or mother or
lord or elder brother must first give notice to the proper office of
the fact and of the time within which he will carry out his intention;
without such a notice, the avenger will be considered a common
murderer. This provision was clearly a limitation of the law of
revenge. These laws of Ieyasu also describe the old methods of
punishing criminals, and then add: "Criminals are to be punished by
branding, or beating, or tying up, and, in capital cases, by spearing
or decapitation; but the old punishments of tearing to pieces and
boiling to death are not to be used." Torture was finally legally
abolished in Japan only as late as 1877.

It has already become quite clear that the prevalence of cruelty or of
humanity depends largely upon the social order that prevails. It is
not at all strange that cruelty, or, at least, lack of sympathy for
suffering in man or beast, should be characteristic of an order based
on constant hand-to-hand conflict. Still more may we expect to find a
great indifference to human suffering wherever the value of man as man
is slighted. Not until the idea of the brotherhood of man has taken
full possession of one's heart and thought does true sympathy spring
up; then, for the first time, comes the power of putting one's self in
a brother's place. The apparently cruel customs of primitive times, in
their treatment of the sick, and particularly of those suffering from
contagious diseases, is the natural, not to say necessary, result of
superstit