-house, and the Geisha summoned to entertain him, with a cavalier
familiarity that would infallibly lead to his summary expulsion from
any well-regulated hotel or public-house, or other places of public
entertainment at home, did he dare to show such want of respect to a
chambermaid or to one of the haughty fair ones serving at a bar. He
means no harm in nine cases out of ten; he has been told that
Japanese girls don't mind what you say to them, and as to the
tea-house girls, well, they are no better than they should be ... but
they are good little women, as capable of guarding their virtue as any
in the world, and it saddens one to think how often they endure, from
a feeling of consideration for the foreigner who does not know any
better, they pityingly think, cavalier treatment they would not submit
to from a Japanese."

Having said so much I feel I am free to admit that a somewhat
different standard of morality does obtain in Japan to that which
exists, or is supposed to exist, among Occidental nations. After all,
morality is to some extent a matter of convention, and a people must,
I suggest, be judged rather by the way in which it lives up to its
standard than by the standard itself, which among some Western nations
is not always strictly observed. The whole subject of morality between
the sexes is one upon which a portly volume might be written. The
sexual relations have been affected by many circumstances, some of
them entirely conventional and having little or nothing to do with
morality as such, while poetry and romance and sentiment have been
allowed to complicate, and still render difficult a dispassionate
consideration of the whole matter. Macaulay in one of his essays has
observed that "the moral principle of a woman is frequently more
impaired by a single lapse from virtue than that of a man by twenty
years of intrigue." He explains this seeming paradox by asserting that
"a vice sanctioned by the general opinion is merely a vice, while a
vice condemned by the general opinion produces a pernicious effect on
the whole character." "One," says Macaulay, "is a local malady, the
other is a constitutional taint." I have quoted the famous historian
in this connection because his observations are, I think, illustrative
of my contention, viz., that morality is largely a matter of
convention, sanctioned or condemned by what Macaulay terms "the
general opinion."

I frankly admit that prostitution has never been rega