Not only inter-territorially, but also in each of the territories themselves, no sort of culture could hold itself for long as the exclusive property of a certain class. In our history, it is true, we had retained a class-system for a very long time, even after the revolution of the Meidji era, and all men had not been equal before the law until very recent times. Nay, to this day we see still some harmless relics of that system in certain regulations preferential to the aristocracy. Regarded as a whole, however, the class-system in Japan has never approached the caste-system of some other countries. If there had been anything like that in our country, it was the distinction of the ordinary people, or we might say, people of the Japanese _pur sang_, from those whose blood was thought to be polluted. Marriage with the latter set of people had been scrupulously avoided on the part of the former. This antipathy entertained by the majority of the nation against the minority was nearly of the same nature as the anti-Semitic feeling in Europe. The coincidence between the two went so far that in Japan tanners, executioners, and so forth were considered as men of occupations exclusive to the people of polluted blood, just as similar trades in Europe had been relegated to the Jews of the Middle Ages. From the fact that in the newly explored part of the empire, such as the northern part of Honto, the settlements of the so-called people of polluted blood are very few, and therefore the feeling against them there is not so acute as it is in the central or most historic part of the empire, we may safely conclude that such a feeling had its origin in some racial difference and dates from the immemorial past. It is very strange that in Japan, where the population is unquestionably of mixed blood, such an antipathy against a certain set of people should have continued stubbornly even to the present day. On the other hand, we have sufficient grounds for believing that, in the course of our history, not a few people of the pure blood have been classed with the impure on account of some criminal action, or they mingled with the latter from some predilection, out of their own free will.