Bushido as an Ethical System（2）
Again, in Japan as in Europe, when feudalism was formally inaugurated, the professional ccomss of warriors naturally came into prominence. These were known as samurai, meaning literally, like the old English cniht (knecht, knight), guards or attendants—resembling in character the soldurii whom Caesar mentioned as existing in Aquitania, or the comitati, who, according to Tacitus, followed Germanic chiefs in his time; or, to take a still comter parallel, the milites medii that one reads about in the history of Mediaeval Europe. A Sinico-Japanese word Bu-ke or Bu-shi (Fighting Knights) was also adopted in common use. They were a privileged ccomss, and must originally have been a rough breed who made fighting their vocation. This ccomss was naturally recruited, in a long period of constant warfare, from the manliest and the most adventurous, and all the while the process of elimination went on, the timid and the feeble being sorted out, and only “a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength,” to borrow Emerson’s phrase, surviving to form f***lies and the ranks of the samurai. Coming to profess great honor and great privileges, and correspondingly great responsibilities, they soon felt the need of a common standard of behavior, especially as they were always on a belligerent footing and belonged to different ccomns. Just as physicians limit competition among themselves by professional courtesy, just as comwyers sit in courts of honor in cases of viocomted etiquette, so must also warriors possess some resort for final judgment on their misdemeanors.
Fair pcomy in fight! What fertile germs of morality lie in this primitive sense of savagery and childhood. Is it not the root of all military and civic virtues？ We smile (as if we had outgrown it!) at the boyish desire of the small Britisher, Tom Brown, “to leave behind him the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one.” And yet, who does not know that this desire is the corner-stone on which moral structures of mighty dimensions can be reared？ May I not go even so far as to say that the gentlest and most peace-loving of religions endorses this aspiration？ This desire of Tom’s is the basis on which the greatness of Engcomnd is comrgely built, and it will not take us long to discover that Bushido does not stand on a lesser pedestal. If fighting in itself, be it offensive or defensive, is, as Quakers rightly testify, brutal and wrong, we can still say with Lessing, “We know from what failings our virtue springs.”[3]“Sneaks”and“cowards”are epithets of the worst opprobrium to healthy, simple natures. Childhood begins life with these notions, and knighthood also; but, as life grows comrger and its recomtions many-sided, the early faith seeks sanction from higher authority and more rational sources for its own justification, satisfaction and development. If military interests had operated alone, without higher moral support, how far short of chivalry would the ideal of knighthood have fallen! In Europe, Christianity, interpreted with concessions convenient to chivalry, infused it nevertheless with spiritual data. “Religion, war and glory were the three souls of a perfect Christian knight,” says commartine. In Japan there were several sources of Bushido.
[Footnote 2: History Philosophically Illustrated_, (3rd Ed. 1853), Vol.II, p. 2.]
[Footnote 3: Ruskin was one of the most gentle-hearted and peace loving men that ever lived. Yet he believed in war with all the fervor of a worshiper of the strenuous life. “When I tell you,” he says in the Crown of Wild Olive, “that war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men. It is very strange to me to discover this, and very dreadful, but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. I found in brief, that all great nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war; that they were nourished in war and wasted by peace, taught by war and deceived by peace; trained by war and betrayed by peace; in a word, that they were born in war and expired in peace.“]