Women samurai who are married, my double told me, must bear
children--if they are to remain married as well as in the
order--before the second period for terminating a childless marriage
is exhausted. I failed to ask for the precise figures from my double
at the time, but I think it is beyond doubt that it is from samurai
mothers of the Greater or Lesser Rule that a very large proportion
of the future population of Utopia will be derived. There is one
liberty accorded to women samurai which is refused to men, and that
is to marry outside the Rule, and women married to men not under the
Rule are also free to become samurai. Here, too, it will be manifest
there is scope for novels and the drama of life. In practice, it
seems that it is only men of great poietic distinction outside the
Rule, or great commercial leaders, who have wives under it. The
tendency of such unions is either to bring the husband under the
Rule, or take the wife out of it. There can be no doubt that these
marriage limitations tend to make the samurai something of an
hereditary class. Their children, as a rule, become samurai. But it
is not an exclusive caste; subject to the most reasonable
qualifications, anyone who sees fit can enter it at any time, and
so, unlike all other privileged castes the world has seen, it
increases relatively to the total population, and may indeed at last
assimilate almost the whole population of the earth.
Section 7
So much my double told me readily.
But now he came to the heart of all his explanations, to the will
and motives at the centre that made men and women ready to undergo
discipline, to renounce the richness and elaboration of the sensuous
life, to master emotions and control impulses, to keep in the key of
effort while they had abundance about them to rouse and satisfy all
desires, and his exposition was more difficult.
He tried to make his religion clear to me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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