--'You may think so,' I answered; 'if you take the generality of the Orientals, but it is not the case with Modern Japan. Even in China the matter was never exactly as you have just said. China has always been wanting in the matter of civil law. But there is one particular feature worth noticing. In the same way as the Romans were rich in the notions of civil law, the Chinese were rich in the ideas of criminal law. I do not, of course, say their system was good from the Western point of view, but in its way it had very good jurisprudence and codes, which were handed down with some necessary modifications from dynasty to dynasty. They knew the importance of separating ethics from jurisprudence for more than a dozen centuries, namely, from the Tang dynasty, when a very good criminal code, which was an improvement and enlargement upon that o£ the preceding dynasty, was enacted. Thus, for instance, torture is looked upon by the Occidentals simply as barbarous, but it has its _raison d'être_ in the Chinese jurisprudence. According to that jurisprudence, no person is to be punished on mere circumstantial evidence, or on the words of witnesses, unless the prisoner himself makes confession of his guilt. The act of confession is technically called the "completion of self-acknowledgment." The object of this is to make sure that no innocent person shall ever be punished. In some cases, if punishments be inflicted, despite the prisoner's strong protest of innocence, on mere circumstantial evidence, or on the evidence of witnesses, great injustice may be done, as was well illustrated in the Beck incident, which recently created so great a sensation in England. Torture is resorted to only in the case where, although the evidence is conclusive, yet the prisoner obstinately refuses to acknowledge his guilt. In other words, the application of torture is only to be resorted to in order that a prisoner whose guilt is quite evident might not be allowed to escape unpunished merely because he obstinately refuses to confess. The _raison d'être_ of the torture, therefore, is not so bad as casual observers imagine. The blame of the method lies in its abuse. We Japanese once followed that jurisprudence, but have given it up because it is liable to misapplication, and we have adopted the European system of judgment by evidence, not because we believed in the infallibility of that system, but because we believed that less injustice would be committed by that system than the other. China has also been very rich in codes of governmental organisation, not indeed in the Western style of constitutional laws; but still, from a literary point of view, they are all very good. Now to return to our subject. If Japan were a country which had not known the usefulness of laws and regulations, and yet had begun to imitate the methods of European legislation with success as she has done, such a result might indeed be a matter of some amazement. She