The Japanese are accused of being dishonest traders. But Japanese contractors disdained to rob their fellow-countrymen who were risking life and limb before Port Arthur. Read and re-read _The Garter Mission to Japan_. Lord Redesdale could detect no signs of arrogance on the faces of the men who drove back Kuropatkin’s regiments into Siberia or sank the Baltic fleet. Some superficial thinkers say that the Japanese are merely mediæval knights fighting with quick-firing guns instead of lances. This is the veriest nonsense. They are _practising_ what was _vainly preached_ by troubadours and romancers to the Brian de Bois Guilberts of the Middle Ages.... When engaged in the composition of my novel _The Serf_, I studied in detail the lives of the paladins to whom were chanted the _Chanson de Roland_, and the stories of _The Round Table_. My conclusions can be studied in that novel which is now in a sixpenny edition. I found very few “Ivanhoes” and plenty of “Front-de-Boeufs” at the Court of Richard “Yea-and-Nay,” who, loyal and filial soul that he was, joined with the King of France in making war on Henry II., his own father. There is great force in Professor Inazo Nitobe’s implied criticism of European chivalry. “Did a monarch behave badly, _Bushido_ did not lay before the suffering people the panacea of a good government by regicide. In all the forty-five centuries during which Japan has passed through many vicissitudes of national existence, no blot of the death of a Charles I., or a Louis XVI. ever stained the pages of her history.” Whether that be true I do not pretend to say. But what I do know is that the throne of England, from the conquest of the country by the first William in 1066, to the accession of the third William in 1688, has been held on a very precarious tenure. The Conqueror himself warred with his son Robert. The latter, and his brothers, gave examples of a _fraternum odium_ worthy of the pen of Tacitus; Stephen was virtually deposed; Henry II. was attacked by his own children; a party of the barons supported John against Richard I., and French invaders against John; Henry III.’s reign was a long record of civil war; Edward II., Richard II., Henry VI. and Edward V. were deposed and murdered; Richard III. was dethroned and slain in battle; Charles I. was executed by his own subjects; James II. betrayed by the founder of the Churchill family. Of a truth the virtue of loyalty has not been the predominant feature of the Anglo-Saxon races. Our greatest novelist, Thackeray, mocks at it. Ever since the Renaissance most of the political philosophers of the West have preached the doctrine “Render _not_ unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s.”