But our readers must not suppose, from the various incidents given, that few happy marriages take place in Japan, or that, in every rank of life, divorce is of every-day occurrence. On the contrary, there seems cause for wonder, not that there are so many divorces, but that there are so many happy marriages, with wives and husbands devoted and faithful. For a nobleman in the olden times to divorce his wife would have caused such a scandal and talk that it rarely occurred. If the wife were disliked, he need have little or nothing to do with her, their rooms, their meals, and their attendance being entirely separate, but he rarely took away from her the name of wife, empty as it might be. She usually would be from some other noble house, and great trouble would arise between the families if he attempted to divorce her. The _samurai_ also, with the same loyalty which they displayed for their lords, were loyal to their wives, and many a novel has been written, or play acted, showing the devotion of husband and wife. The quiet, undemonstrative love, though very different from the ravings of a lover in the nineteenth century novel, is perhaps truer to life. Among the merchants and lower classes there has been, and is, a much lower standard of morality, but the few years which have passed since the Revolution of 1868 are not a fair sample of what Japan has been. Noblemen, _samurai_, and merchants have had much to undergo in the great changes, and, as is the case in all such transition periods, old customs and restraints, and old standards of morality, have been broken down and have not been replaced. There is no doubt that men have run to excesses of all sorts, and divorces have been much more frequent of late years.[*76]