view do we take
ourselves, who callously leave youth to go forth into the enchanted
forest, full of spells and dire chimeras, with no guidance more complete
than is afforded by these five precepts?

_Honour thy father and thy mother_. Yes, but does that mean to obey? and
if so, how long and how far? _Thou shall not kill_. Yet the very
intention and purport of the prohibition may be best fulfilled by
killing. _Thou shall not commit adultery_. But some of the ugliest
adulteries are committed in the bed of marriage and under the sanction
of religion and law. _Thou shalt not bear false witness_. How? by
speech or by silence also? or even by a smile? _Thou shalt not steal._
Ah, that indeed! But what is _to steal_?

To steal? It is another word to be construed; and who is to be our
guide? The police will give us one construction, leaving the world only
that least minimum of meaning without which society would fall in
pieces; but surely we must take some higher sense than this; surely we
hope more than a bare subsistence for mankind; surely we wish mankind to
prosper and go on from strength to strength, and ourselves to live
rightly in the eye of some more exacting potentate than a policeman. The
approval or the disapproval of the police must be eternally indifferent
to a man who is both valorous and good. There is extreme discomfort, but
no shame, in the condemnation of the law. The law represents that
modicum of morality which can be squeezed out of the ruck of mankind;
but what is that to me, who aim higher and seek to be my own more
stringent judge? I observe with pleasure that no brave man has ever
given a rush for such considerations. The Japanese have a nobler and
more sentimental feeling for this social bond into which we all are born
when we come into the world, and whose comforts and protection we all
indifferently share throughout our lives:--but even to them, no more
than to our Western saints and heroes, does the law of the state
supersede the higher law of duty. Without hesitation and without
remorse, they transgress the stiffest enactments rather than abstain
from doing right. But the accidental superior duty being thus fulfilled,
they at once return in allegiance to the common duty of all citizens;
and hasten to denounce themselves; and value at an equal rate their just
crime and their equally just submission to its punishment.

The evading of the police will not long satisfy an active conscience or
a though