It has also been suggested that our endurance of pain and indifference to death are due to less sensitive nerves. This is plausible as far as it goes. The next question is,—Why are our nerves less tightly strung? It may be our climate is not so stimulating as the American. It may be our monarchical form of government does not excite us as much as the Republic does the Frenchman. It may be that we do not read _Sartor Resartus_ as zealously as the Englishman. Personally, I believe it was our very excitability and sensitiveness which made it a necessity to recognize and enforce constant self-repression; but whatever may be the explanation, without taking into account long years of discipline in self-control, none can be correct. Discipline in self-control can easily go too far. It can well repress the genial current of the soul. It can force pliant natures into distortions and monstrosities. It can beget bigotry, breed hypocrisy or hebetate affections. Be a virtue never so noble, it has its counterpart and counterfeit. We must recognize in each virtue its own positive excellence and follow its positive ideal, and the ideal of self-restraint is to keep our mind _level_—as our expression is—or, to borrow a Greek term, attain the state of _euthymia_, which Democritus called the highest good. The acme of self-control is reached and best illustrated in the first of the two institutions which we shall now bring to view; namely, THE INSTITUTIONS OF SUICIDE AND REDRESS, of which (the former known as _hara-kiri_ and the latter as _kataki-uchi_) many foreign writers have treated more or less fully. To begin with suicide, let me state that I confine my observations only to _seppuku_ or _kappuku_, popularly known as _hara-kiri_—which means self-immolation by disembowelment. “Ripping the abdomen? How absurd!”—so cry those to whom the name is new. Absurdly odd as it may sound at first to foreign ears, it can not be so very foreign to students of Shakespeare, who puts these words in Brutus’ mouth—“Thy (Cæsar’s) spirit walks abroad and turns our swords into our proper entrails.” Listen to a modern English poet, who in his _Light of Asia_, speaks of a sword piercing the bowels of a queen:—none blames him for bad English or breach of modesty. Or, to take still another example, look at Guercino’s painting of Cato’s death, in the Palazzo Rossa in Genoa. Whoever has read the swan-song which Addison makes Cato sing, will not jeer at the sword half-buried in his abdomen. In our minds this mode of death is associated with instances of noblest deeds and of most touching pathos, so that nothing repugnant, much less ludicrous, mars our conception of it. So wonderful is the transforming power of virtue, of greatness, of tenderness, that the vilest form of death assumes a sublimity and becomes a symbol of new life, or else—the sign which Constantine beheld would not conquer the world!