“The love that we bear to our Emperor,” continues Professor Inazo Nitobe, “naturally brings with it a love for the country over which he reigns. Hence our sentiment of patriotism--I will not call it a duty, for, as Dr. Samuel Johnson rightly suggests, patriotism is a sentiment and is more than a duty--I say our patriotism is fed by two streams of sentiment, namely, that of personal love to the monarch, and of our common love for the soil which gave us birth and provides us with hearth and home. Nay, there is another source from which our patriotism is fed: it is that the land guards in its bosom the bones of our fathers; and here I may dwell awhile upon our Filial Piety. “Parental love man possesses in common with the beasts, but filial love is little found among animals after they are weaned. Was it the last of the virtues to develop in the order of ethical evolution? Whatever its origin, Mr. Herbert Spencer evidently thinks it is a waning trait in an evolving humanity; and I am aware that everywhere there are signs of its giving way to individualism and egotism; especially does this seem to be the case in Christendom. “Christianity, by which I do not mean what Jesus of Nazareth taught, but a mongrel moral system, a concoction of a little of obsolete Judaism, of Egyptian asceticism, of Greek sublimity, of Roman arrogance, of Teutonic superstition, and, in fact, of anything and everything that tends to make sublunary existence easy by sanctioning the wholesale slaughter of weaker races, or now and then the lopping of crowned heads,--Christianity, I say, teaches that the nucleus of a well-ordered society lay in conjugal relations between the first parents, and further that therefore a man must leave father and mother and cleave to his wife. A teaching this, in itself not easy of comprehension, as Paul himself admits, and very dubious in application, meaning, as it so often does, that a silly youth, when he is infatuated with a giddy girl, may spurn his parents! “Christ certainly never meant it, nor did the decalogue command, ‘Thou shalt love thy wife more than thou shouldst honour thy father and mother.’” The dark, unfathomable eyes of our inscrutable Oriental friends are surveying us. Is it likely that they fail to perceive such patent facts as the dwindling of the birth-rate, the ever increasing thirst for material pleasures which is the characteristic of our urban population, the growth of Socialism, which is its complement, the ignorance of the rulers, and the obsolete education of the ruled? We boast of our genius for colonization. Boasts are not facts.