e the family from want.

The same antipodal difference between East and West--here "the family
is the social unit" and with us the individual himself--explains the
system of adoption: a younger son not being essential to the
maintenance of the family cult may be adopted into another family,
while the eldest son may not. On the same principle the father rules,
not because of what he represents as an Individual, but because he
represents the Family. Whenever he chooses, he abdicates, and must
then join his other children in obeying the eldest son.

In the relations of citizenship the same disregard of {56} individual
rights was the ancient rule, not merely in the fact that for centuries
the smallest details of everyday life were regulated by law, but more
seriously in that the Samurai, or privileged class, might "cut down in
cold blood a beggar, a merchant, or a farmer on the slightest
provocation, or simply for the purpose of testing his sword," while in
case of the ruin of their cause it was the honorable and natural thing
for soldiers to commit "hari-kiri"--that is to say, commit suicide by
disemboweling themselves. A Japanese writer recently declared that
"the value of the individual life is an illustration of the Christian
spirit" that is profoundly influencing Japan, and he mentioned as an
example that formerly suicide, in such circumstances as I have
mentioned, "was regarded as an honorable act; now it is regarded as a
sin."

Without professing the religion of fatalism which so influences the
peoples of the Nearer East, the Japanese soldiers behave like
fatalists because the fundamental basis of the social order for
centuries has been the necessity of the Individual to sacrifice
pleasure, comfort, or life itself when required either by the Family
or by the Social Order. And this partially explains why it is said in
sober earnest that the highest ambition of most Japanese schoolboys
to-day is to die for their Emperor.

---

This is my last letter from Japan, and my next letter will be from
Korea--if the cholera doesn't get me. It has been raging in Osaka and
in Kobe, both of which cities I have thought it necessary to visit in
order to get first-hand information about industrial conditions.
Ordinarily, the cholera victim lives only a few hours. The first day's
record here in Kobe, I believe, showed six cases and five deaths.
Gradually, however, cholera is being stamped out, just as we have
eradicated yellow f