The fundamental principle of Japanese society was, and still is, reverent obedience to superiors. This polite and humble deference is exhibited in their language and in their manners and customs, and has become so thoroughly incorporated into their natures that it even yet resists the levelling tendency of the present age. The language is full of honorifics to be applied to or concerning another, and of humilifics to be applied concerning self. I and mine are thus always ignorant, stupid, dirty, homely, insignificant, etc., while you and yours are ever intelligent, wise, clean, beautiful, noble etc. Perhaps there is nothing that causes the student of the vernacular deeper chagrin than to find that he has made so serious an error as to transpose the humble and the honorific words or phrases! The ordinary salutation is really an obeisance, as it consists of a profound bow,—on the street with body bent half forward, in the house with forehead touching the floor. This deep and universal feeling of reverence for superiors and elders early developed into worship, both of the family and of the national ancestors. This is the fundamental and central idea of Shintō, the native cult, of which more will be written in a subsequent chapter. The Japanese family[46] was, in its constitution, an empire, with absolute authority in the hands of one man. The husband was, theoretically and practically, the great authority to whom wife and children were subject. He was a veritable autocrat and despot; and he received superciliously the homage of all the family, who literally bowed down before him. The family, and not the individual, was the unit of society; but by the new codes now in operation the individual has acquired greater rights. There is much hope, therefore, that gradually the tyranny of the family will be eliminated. One writer on Japan has well said: “The Empire is one great family; the family is a little empire.”[47] In truth, the empire is founded and maintained on the family idea of one line “in unbroken succession” from Jimmu Tennō.