It is necessary here to observe that the discipline to which the nation had been subjected up to the age of the great Shinto writers, seems to have had a curious evolutional history of its own. In primitive times it had been much less uniform, less complex, less minutely organized, though not less implacable; and it had continued to develop and elaborate more and more with the growth and consolidation of society, until, under the Tokugawa Shogunate the possible maximum of regulation was reached. In other words, the yoke had been made heavier and heavier in proportion to the growth of the national strength,--in proportion to the power of the people to bear it.... We have seen that, from the beginning of this civilization, the whole life of the citizen was ordered for him: his occupation, his marriage, his rights of fatherhood, his rights to hold or to dispose of property,--all these matters were settled by religious custom. We have also seen that outside as well as inside of his home, his actions were under supervision, and that a single grave breach of usage might cause his social ruin,--in which case he would be given to understand that he was not merely a social, but also a religious offender; that the communal god was angry with him; and that to pardon his fault might [163] provoke the divine vengeance against the entire settlement. But it yet remains to be seen what rights were left him by the central authority ruling his district,--which authority represented a third form of religious despotism from which there was no appeal in ordinary cases. Material for the study of the old laws and customs have not yet been collected in sufficient quantity to yield us full information as to the conditions of all classes before Meiji. But a great deal of precious work has been accomplished in this direction by American scholars; and the labours of Professor Wigmore and of the late Dr. Simmons have furnished documentary evidence from which much can be learned about the legal status of the masses during the Tokugawa period. This, as I have said, was the period of the most elaborated regulation. The extent to which the people were controlled can be best inferred from the nature and number of the sumptuary laws to which they were subjected. Sumptuary laws in Old Japan probably exceeded in multitude and minuteness anything of which Western legal history yields record. Rigidly as the family-cult dictated behaviour in the home, strictly as the commune enforced its standards of communal duty,--just so rigidly and strictly did the rulers of the nation dictate how the individual--man, woman, or child--should dress, walk, sit, [164] speak, work, eat, drink. Amusements were not less unmercifully regulated than were labours.