Such a policy, reminds one of the Amherst agricultural experiment in which bands of iron were strapped around a much-afflicted squash, in order to test vital potency. It recalls the pretty little story of Picciola, in which a tender plant must grow between the interstices of the bricks in a prison yard. Besides the potent bonds of the only orthodox Confucian philosophy which was allowed and the legally recognized religions, there was gradually formed a marvellous system of legislation, that turned the whole nation into a secret society in which spies and hypocrites flourished like fungus on a dead log. Besides the unwritten code of private law,[4] that is, the local and general customs founded on immemorial usage, there was that peculiar legal system framed by Iyéyasŭ, bequeathed as a legacy and for over two hundred years practically the supreme law of the land. What this law was, it was exceedingly difficult, if not utterly impossible, for the aliens dwelling in the country at Nagasaki ever to find out. Keenly intellectual, as many of the physicians, superintendents and elect members of the Dutch trading company were, they seem never to have been able to get hold of what has been called "The Testament of Iyéyasŭ."[5] This consisted of one hundred laws or regulations, based on a home-spun sort of Confucianism, intended to be orthodoxy "unbroken for ages eternal." To a man of western mode of thinking, the most astonishing thing is that this law was esoteric.[6] The people knew of it only by its irresistible force, and by the constant pressure or the rare easing of its iron hand. Those who executed the law were drilled in its routine from childhood, and this routine became second nature. Only a few copies of the original instrument were known, and these were kept with a secrecy which to the people became a sacred mystery guarded by a long avenue of awe. The Dutchmen at Déshima. The Dutchmen who lived at Déshima for two centuries and a half, and the foreigners who first landed at the treaty ports in 1859, on inquiring about the methods of the Japanese Government, the laws and their administration, found that everything was veiled behind a vague embodiment of something which was called "the Law." What that law was, by whom enacted, and under what sanctions enforced, no one could tell; though all seemed to stand in awe of it as something of superhuman efficiency. Its mysteriousness was only equalled by the abject submission which it received. Foreign diplomatists, on trying to deal with the seat and source of authority, instead of seeing the real head of power, played, as it were, a game of chess against a mysterious hand stretched out from behind a curtain. Morally, the whole tendency of such a dual system of exclusion and of inclusion was to make a nation of liars, foster confirmed habits of deceit, and create a code of politeness vitiated by insincerity.