nd a reminder not to misunderstand
individual rights.

In later times, common sense served to make the advantages of harmony
appreciated.

It directed the descendants of peoples exclusively warlike toward the
secret place where science unfolds itself to the gaze of the vulgar; then
it taught them to provide for their existence by working.

It has demonstrated to them the necessity of reflection, by inciting
them to model their present course of life on the lessons which come
from the past.

It has given them the means to evoke it easily and effectively.

It has injected into their veins the calmness which permits them to draw
just conclusions and to adopt toward preceding reasonings the attitude
of absolute neutrality, without which all former presentiments are
marred by error.

Each epoch was, for common sense, an opportunity to manifest itself
differently.

At the moment when poetry was highly honored, it would have been
unreasonable to have ignored it, for the bards excited great enthusiasm
by their songs which gave birth to heroes.

And now, imbued with the principles which in his day might be taken to
represent what we to-day call advanced ideas, Yoritomo continues:

"Common sense can, then, without renouncing its devotion to truth, take
various forms or shades, for the truth of yesterday is not always the
truth of to-day.

"The gods of the past are considered simply as idols in our day and the
virtues of the distant past would be, at present, moral defects which
would prevent men from winning the battle of life, whose ideal is The
Best for which all the faculties should strive."

The Shogun also touches lightly on a subject which, already discust in
his time, has become, in our day, a burning truth; it is a question of a
fault, which in the world of practical life and in that of business can
cause considerable injury to him who allows it to be implanted in him.

We refer to that tendency which has been adorned or rather branded
successively with the names of hypochondria, pessimism, and lastly
neurasthenia, an appellation which comprises all kinds of nervous
diseases, the characteristic of which is incurable melancholy.

"There are people," he says, "who are afflicted with a special
color-blindness.

"Everything they look at assumes immediately to their eyes the most
somber hues.

"They see in a flower only the germ of dry-rot; the most ideal
beauty appears to them only like the negligible cove