The strictly class character of this loose commercial morality is shown by the experience of the samurai after the abolition of feudalism in 1868. Upon that event many of them engaged in mercantile business, carrying with them their high moral standard, with results pathetically depicted by Nitobé in these words: “Those who had eyes to see could not weep enough, those who had hearts to feel could not sympathize enough, with the fate of many a noble and honest samurai who signally and irrevocably failed in his new and unfamiliar field of trade and industry, through sheer lack of shrewdness in coping with his artful plebeian rival.... It will be long before it will be recognized how many fortunes were wrecked in the attempt to apply Bushido ethics to business methods, but it was soon apparent to every observing mind that the ways of wealth were not the ways of honor.”[217] About ninety-nine out of every hundred samurai who ventured into business are said to have failed. This passage out of the history of New Japan carries with it various lessons, but particularly does it teach how unjust it is to judge the morality of a people by the morality of a class.[218] Notwithstanding the disastrous outcome of their first venture into the mercantile field, the samurai still remain in business, so that there is going on to-day in Japan in the commercial domain a competition between two moral standards. The triumph of the standard of the samurai over that of the plebeian trader would mean the development in Japan of a matchless business morality, which, in the increasing closeness of commercial relations between the East and the West, might well act cleansingly on our own business ethics.[219] [Sidenote: Moral education in the schools; the Imperial Rescript] The rapid transformation in the institutions and ideas of Old Japan after the revolution of 1868 created a crisis in the moral life of the Japanese people. The old basis of the national morality was destroyed. Reverence for the Confucian teachings was lost. Respect for ancestral customs was seriously impaired. Moral anarchy impended. In this critical juncture some proposed that Buddhism, others that Christianity, should be made the basis of the moral code.