Japanese believe that the effect of this instruction upon the national character, reënforcing the ancestral virtues of loyalty and devotion to duty, was exhibited in the recent war with Russia.[224] A noteworthy feature of the rescript is that it is simply a reaffirmation of the teachings of the ancient moralists and the ethical traditions of the fathers--an inculcation of those virtues of loyalty and filial piety which the Japanese people have held in esteem and practiced from generation to generation. A second feature of the edict which arrests attention is the universalistic and secular character of the morality inculcated. The virtues enjoined are universal benevolence, loyalty to duty, and self-devotion to the common good--a morality of the universal human heart and conscience, a morality, as the edict declares, good for all ages and for all places. [Sidenote: Japanese morals and Western civilization] The foregoing anticipates and gives answer to the questions: What will be the effect upon Japanese morality of those changes now going on in the life and thought of Japan through contact with the civilization of the West? What will be the effect upon Japanese public morality when the common belief in the divine descent of the Emperor, which is the root from which springs the primal duty of loyalty, is undermined, as modern science is certain to undermine it? What will be the effect upon Japanese domestic morality when Occidental conceptions of the family and of woman’s place in it come to modify, as they seem likely to do, those ideas and sentiments which from time immemorial have formed the basis of the family ethics of the East? What will be the ethical consequences when Western science renders obsolete the Shinto learning and the Confucian classics, which have hitherto formed the basis of so large a part of Japanese morality? What will be the effect upon the ancient ideal of character of the adoption of Christian ideas and teachings in place of those which have so long nourished the ethical feelings and sentiments of the Japanese people?