ertained of it." Professor Chamberlain writes, in his
_Things Japanese_ (285):

"One love marriage we have heard of, one in eighteen years!
But then both the young people had been brought up in
America. Accordingly they took the reins in their own hands,
to the great scandal of all their friends and relations."

On another page (308) he says:

"According to the Confucian ethical code, which the Japanese
adopted, a man's parents, his teacher, and his lord claim
his life-long service, his wife standing on an immeasurably
lower plane."[45]

Ball, in his _Things Chinese_ comments on the efforts made by Chinamen
to suppress love-matches as being immoral; and the French author, L.A.
Martin, says, in his book on Chinese morals (171):

"Chinese philosophers know nothing of Platonic love;
they speak of the relations between men and women with
the greatest reserve, and we must attribute this to the
low esteem in which they generally hold the fair sex;
in their illustrations of the disorders of love, it is
almost always the woman on whom the blame of seduction
is laid."

GREEK SCORN FOR WOMAN-LOVE

The Greeks were in the same boat. They did indeed distinguish between
two kinds of love, the sensual and the celestial, but--as we shall see
in detail in the special chapter devoted to them--they applied the
celestial kind only to friendship and boy-love, never to the love
between men and women. That love was considered impure and degrading,
a humiliating affliction of the mind, not for a moment comparable to
the friendship between men or the feelings that unite parents and
children. This is the view taken in Plato's writings, in Xenophon's
_Symposium_ and everywhere. In Plutarch's _Dialogue on Love_, written
five hundred years after Plato, one of the speakers ventures a faint
protest against the current notion that "there is no gust of
friendship or heavenly ravishment of mind," in the love for women; but
this is a decided innovation on the traditional Greek view, which is
thus brutally expressed by one of the interlocutors in the same
dialogue:

"True love has nothing to do with women, and I assert that
you who are passionately inclined toward women and maidens
do not love any more than flies love milk or bees honey, or
cooks the calves and birds whom they fatten in the dark....
The passion for women consists at the best i