which he had had set up in the house for daily devotional contemplation. Finally another paragon actually sells himself in perpetuity as a slave that he may thus procure the wherewithal to bury with due honor his anything but worthy progenitor, who had first cheated his neighbors and then squandered his ill-gotten gains in riotous living. Of these tales, as of certain questionable novels in a slightly different line, the eventual moral is considered quite competent to redeem the general immorality of the plot. Along such a curriculum the youthful Chinaman is made to run. A very similar system prevails in Japan, the difference between the two consisting in quantity rather than quality. The books in the two cases are much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly little when we consider that in the one case it is his own classics the student is reading, in the other the Chinaman's. If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling is over he is set to learn his father's trade. To undertake to learn any trade but his father's would strike the family as simply preposterous. Why should he adopt another line of business? And, if he did, what other business should he adopt? Is his father's occupation not already there, a part of the existing order of things; and is he not the son of his father and heir therefore of the paternal skill? Not that such inherited aptness is recognized scientifically; it is simply taken for granted instinctively. It is but a halfhearted intuition, however, for the possibility of an inheritance from the mother's side is as out of the question as if her severance from her own family had an ex post facto effect. As for his individual predilection in the matter, nature has considerately conformed to custom by giving him none. He becomes a cabinet-maker, for instance, because his ancestors always have been cabinet-makers. He inherits the family business as a necessary part of the family name. He is born to his trade, not naturally selected because of his fitness for it. But he usually is amply qualified for the position, for generations of practice, if only on one side of the house, accumulate a vast deal of technical skill. The result of this system of clan guilds in all branches of industry is sufficiently noticeable. The almost infinite superiority of Japanese artisans over their European fellow-craftsmen is world-known. On the other hand the tendency of the occupation in the abstract to swallow up the individual in the concrete is as evident to theory as it is patent in practice. Eventually the man is lost in the manner. The very names of trades express the fact. The Japanese word for cabinet-maker, for example, means literally cutting-thing-house, and is now applied as distinctively to the man as to his shop. Nominally as well as practically the youthful Japanese artisan makes his introduction to the world, much after the manner of the hero of Lecocq's comic opera,