--'I cannot,' I answered, 'profess that every man of our troops is so high-minded as you say, or at least, I cannot say so myself, being Japanese; but assuming it to be the case, the kind of doubt to which you give expression is entertained by many Occidentals, and questions to that effect have often been put to me. I can, however, give no other answer than to repeat that there is no such religious belief in our case, as there is in Mohammedanism. In Europe one often engages in a deadly duel on account of some dispute, sometimes for public reasons, but often for other reasons which do not appear commendable to outsiders: those who fight surely do not risk their lives from any religious belief in their cause. They do so because, as far as they themselves are concerned, a consideration of honour demands. This sentiment is exactly similar to our sense of honour, only in our case we have, perhaps, made it more rational and more general. To attain this ideal, a long training and preparation is necessary, but when once attained, there is nothing to wonder at. If one imagined that a man killed in a duel on account of a quarrel over a woman sacrificed his life because he believed he would be happy in a future life,--if he died in that fashion, every one else would laugh at him. Why, then, is there anything to wonder at when we say that we Japanese can be fearless of death without connecting it with a religious belief of the future life, for a cause which is far nobler than that of the ordinary Western custom of sacrificing one's life in a duel. The _morale_ of our troops is the result purely of ordinary ethical training and diffusion of national traditions. Loyalty and patriotism are the highest ideals of the Japanese nation. Japanese ethics have taught for centuries how to die an honourable death, and yet one must not think that Japanese ethics teach only how to die: they also teach how to live.' --'What do you mean by that?' --'I mean to say, in Bushido, death was not valued for its own sake, even in a battle, for if one died a useless or dishonourable death, it was called a dog's death, which, of course, is a term of contempt. We still have the same notion of death. In a book on Bushido, entitled _Chiku-ba-sho_, written in the fourteenth century A.D., by Shiwa-Yoshimasa, as I mentioned the other day, we have in the very opening page, as follows: