ous incidents given,
that few happy marriages take place in Japan, or that, in every rank of
life, divorce is of every-day occurrence. On the contrary, there seems
cause for wonder, not that there are so many divorces, but that there
are so many happy marriages, with wives and husbands devoted and
faithful. For a nobleman in the olden times to divorce his wife would
have caused such a scandal and talk that it rarely occurred. If the wife
were disliked, he need have little or nothing to do with her, their
rooms, their meals, and their attendance being entirely separate, but he
rarely took away from her the name of wife, empty as it might be. She
usually would be from some other noble house, and great trouble would
arise between the families if he attempted to divorce her. The _samurai_
also, with the same loyalty which they displayed for their lords, were
loyal to their wives, and many a novel has been written, or play acted,
showing the devotion of husband and wife. The quiet, undemonstrative
love, though very different from the ravings of a lover in the
nineteenth century novel, is perhaps truer to life.

Among the merchants and lower classes there has been, and is, a much
lower standard of morality, but the few years which have passed since
the Revolution of 1868 are not a fair sample of what Japan has been.
Noblemen, _samurai_, and merchants have had much to undergo in the great
changes, and, as is the case in all such transition periods, old customs
and restraints, and old standards of morality, have been broken down and
have not been replaced. There is no doubt that men have run to excesses
of all sorts, and divorces have been much more frequent of late
years.[*76]

Our little Japanese maiden knows, when she blackens her teeth, dons her
wedding dress, and starts on her bridal journey to her husband's house,
that upon her good behavior alone depend her chances of a happy life.
She is to be henceforth the property of a man of whom she probably knows
little, and who has the power, at any whim, to send her back to her
father's house in disgrace, deprived of her children, with nothing to
live for or hope for, except that some man will overlook the disgrace of
her divorce, and by marrying her give her the only opportunity that a
Japanese woman can have of a home other than that of a servant or
dependent. That these evils will be remedied in time, there seems little
reason to doubt, but just now the various cooks who are