more single-mindedly,
and more satisfactorily to those about them, than the women of Japan.

Many argue that the purity of Japanese women, as compared with the men,
the ready obedience which they yield, their sweet characters and
unselfish devotion as wives and mothers, are merely the results of the
restraint under which they live, and that they are too weak to be
allowed to enjoy freedom of thought and action. Whether this be true or
no is a point which we leave for others to take up, as time shall have
provided new data for reasoning on the subject.

To me, the sense of duty seems to be strongly developed in the Japanese
women, especially in those of the samurai class. Conscience seems as
active, though often in a different manner, as the old-fashioned New
England conscience, transmitted through the bluest of Puritan blood. And
when a duty has once been recognized as such, no timidity, or
mortification, or fear of ridicule will prevent the performance of it. A
case comes to my mind now of a young girl of sixteen, who made public
confession before her schoolmates of shortcomings of which none of them
knew, for the sake of easing her troubled conscience and warning her
schoolmates against similar errors. The circumstances were as follows:
The young girl had recently lost her grandmother, a most loving and
affectionate old lady, who had taken the place of a mother to the child
from her earliest infancy. In a somewhat unhappy home, the love of the
old grandmother was the one bright spot; and when she was taken away,
the poor, lonely child's memory recalled all of her own shortcomings to
this beloved friend; and, too late to make amendment to the old lady
herself, she dwelt on her own undutifulness, and decided that she must
by some means do penance, or make atonement for her fault. She might, if
she made a confession before her schoolmates, warn them against similar
mistakes; and accordingly she prepared, for the literary society in
which the girls took what part they chose, a long confession, written
in poetical style, and read it before her schoolmates and teachers. It
was a terrible ordeal, as one could see by the blushing face and
breaking voice, often choked with sobs; and when at the conclusion she
urged her friends to behave in such a way to their dear ones that they
need never suffer what she had had to endure since her grandmother's
death, there was not a dry eye in the room, and many of the girls were
sobbing a