Chapter 8

At last in 1892 the Parliament passed an act deferring the taking effect of the code till 1897 and ordering in the meantime a careful revisal of the draft. A new Commission was appointed which consisted of three most eminent professors of law in Japan, each representing one of the three systems of law recognized there.[4] These Commissioners, aided by a number of efficient assistants, looked into the codes and laws of some fifteen leading American and European states. As representing the French system they consulted the codes of Louisiana, Belgium, France, Holland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. As representing the German system they consulted the codes and laws of Austria, Montenegro, Prussia, Saxony, Switzerland, and the draft Civil Code of the German Empire. As representing the English system they consulted the leading American and English reports and treatises, the draft Civil Code of New York, and the codes of California and British India.[5]

[4] I refer to Professors Hodzumi, Tomii, and Ume. Prof. Hodzumi is a barrister-at-law of the Middle Temple, and is one of the ablest representatives of English law in Japan. Prof. Tomii is a _Docteur en Droit_ of the Facility of Lyons, and is by far the ablest expounder of the French codes in Japan. Prof. Ume, though a bearer of the same degree from the same Faculty as Prof. Tomii, has attended several German universities, and is more of the German school than of the French. The Commission itself consisted of several other distinguished personages, with the Prime Minister at the head. But these three professors composed what was called the "Compilation Committee," so that practically they were the Commission.

[5] Prof. Ume, a member of the Commission, is responsible for these statements so far as they relate to the codes and laws consulted. The classifications, however, are my own.

After four years of the most constant application the Commission submitted in 1896 a revisal of a part of the original draft. Had the Commission had the entire code revised they could not have shown greater wisdom. For the parts incomplete were those dealing with the Family Law and Successions, and the Commission remembered that these were the parts that occasioned the most vital objections to the old code. The Parliament referred the revised draft code to a Committee of their own, of which Mr. Hatoyama, the present Speaker, was made the chairman. After making a careful examination and some important modifications, Mr. Hatoyama reported favorably to its adoption. The Parliament acted according to his advice, and the draft became the law.

In its general arrangement the new code follows what the German jurists call the Pandekten system. It is divided into five general parts. Part I is called "S[=o]soku," or General Laws, and deals with persons, natural and artificial, as the subjects of rights; with things as the objects of rights; and with juristic acts as setting rights in motion. One cannot help being astonished at and gratified with the remarkable extent to which Prof. Holland's views as expressed in his book on jurisprudence seem to be adopted in this part of the code.[6] Part II is called "Bukken," or _Jus in Rem_, corresponding to the Sachenrecht of the German code, and dealing with Possession, Ownership, etc., etc. Part III is called "Jinken," or _Jus in Personam_, corresponding to the Forderungsrecht of the German code, and dealing with General Law of Obligations, with Obligations arising _ex contractu_, _quasi ex contractu_, and _ex delicto_. The General Law of Obligations is taken largely from the Forderungsrecht of the Swiss code. The law of Contracts and Torts is taken entirely from the English law. Parts IV and V, dealing with the Family Law and the Law of Successions respectively, have not as yet been published, for reasons already indicated.

[6] This may be a mere conjecture on my own part. It is possible that the Commissioners never consulted his book, though to assert such a thing of them would be an insult to their scholarship. Be it as it may, it is a fact beyond question that their arrangement of these topics presents a remarkable coincidence to that of Prof. Holland's, and this is a matter upon which every thoughtful Japanese may well pride himself.

Such is the new Civil Code of Japan, adopted by the Imperial Parliament in its session of 1896. Truly, the year 1896 has been an eventful year for Japan. The war with China had brought glory to her arms. Formosa and numerous other islands had been added to her possessions. The insurgents of Formosa had been pacified. The treaties with the leading nations of the world had been revised, providing for the abolishment of the disgraceful extra-territoriality régime in Japan, to take effect, however, upon the taking effect of the new Civil Code. The last and greatest event of all, the new Code was adopted. With equal propriety, then, the Emperor Mutsuhito might have joined Justinian, in proclaiming:--"Imperatoriam Majestatem non solum armis decoratam, sed etiam legibus opportet esse armatam, ut utrumque tempus et bellorum et pacis recte possit gubernari!"

JOHN RUSKIN:

A TYPE OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY MANHOOD.

BY B. O. FLOWER.

The name John Ruskin is justly entitled to a foremost place among those of the builders of twentieth-century civilization. In him we find a rare combination of genius, culture, and refinement, blended with a tender concern for all earth's unfortunates. He is at once artist, philosopher, and philanthropist; but he is more than these; there is much of the austere religious reformer, giving a serious gravity to all the utterances of the glad-souled artist, a mingling of the spirit of a Savonarola with the imagination of a Turner.

John Ruskin, more than any other man of our time in like station of life, stands for the civilization which we believe is destined to glorify the coming century, for in his life all thought of ease, fame, and preferment,--all consideration of self,--is overmastered by his love for others. Endowed by nature with the imagination of a poet, the eyes of an artist, the brain of a philosopher, the soul of a prophet, and the heart of a man, he has conscientiously employed all his gifts as a sacred trust given to him that he might bless and enlighten his day, and ennoble his civilization for all time.

He was born amid affluence, and received the best educational advantages the age afforded. After graduating from Oxford in 1842, he studied painting under Copley Fielding and J. D. Harding. Subsequently he spent some time in Italy, finishing his art education in the land of earth's greatest painters.

While in college he composed many poems, but on leaving the university he turned his attention to art and prose composition. His "Modern Painters" was justly hailed as one of the noblest works of the century, and instantly placed its author in the ranks of the foremost art critics of the world.

Few if any of his admirers will agree with all his critical views. He not infrequently falls into those errors which we naturally expect to find in a man of intense feeling, of strong conviction, and of vivid imagination. If a positive idea takes possession of his mind, it is liable to give a strong bias to his thought, and in a degree interferes with that nice sense of proportion so essential to a great critic. On more than one occasion Mr. Ruskin has frankly admitted that his views and opinions were erroneous owing to being based on a partial appearance or influenced by pernicious ideas. A notable illustration of his thought being biassed by preconceived ideas is found in the religious opinions put forward in the early edition of parts I and II of "Modern Painters." And in a preface written in 1871 for a revised edition of his works, the philosopher calls attention to his early views, declaring that he was "wholly mistaken" and continuing: "I had been educated in the narrow doctrine of a narrow sect, and had read history obliquely, as a sectarian necessarily must."

Such are the blemishes which occasionally creep into the works of this master mind. They are, however, merely spots on the sun, which do not appear frequently enough to seriously dim the splendor of a critical work which in my judgment surpasses in real value that of any English scholar of the century. "Modern Painters," "The Stones of Venice," "The Seven Lamps," and his other works dealing with art are far more than criticisms; they touch the sleeping soul, they fire the spirit and awaken the conscience. They make the reader feel a new love for nature and art alike, and with this pure and inspiring love comes the desire for more knowledge. They appeal to the spiritual aspirations even more than to the artistic impulses or the intellectual apprehension. The moral exaltation which pervades his writings springs from his profoundly philosophical and religious nature. In all his work, as in his noble life, he has ever been moved by an intense desire to uplift and dignify humanity and to impress upon the public mind the subtle but positive effect for good exerted by true art. "I have had," he tells us in "The Two Paths," "but one steady aim in all I have ever tried to teach, namely, to declare that whatever was great in human art was the expression of man's delight in God's work."

With Ruskin, life is august; its possibilities for good and evil are never forgotten.

"Remember," he urges, "that every day of your life is ordaining irrevocably for good or evil the custom and practice of your soul; ordaining either sacred customs of dear and lovely recurrence, or trenching deeper and deeper the furrows for seed of sorrow. Now, therefore, see that no day passes in which you do not make yourself a somewhat better creature.... You will find that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will in the quickest and delicatest ways improve yourself."

The pleasure which springs from loyalty to duty is strenuously insisted upon by Ruskin, and he, more than any other illustrious man in our time, has reached such heights of unselfishness as to enable him to fully appreciate the unalloyed pleasure which flows from a life of sacrifice. If he is austere, he is also very humane. The fountains of pleasure that he would have us drink deeply from would leave no bitter aftertaste. He delights in no pseudo-pleasure; faithfulness to the highest ideal, untiring effort at complete self-mastery, a settled determination to work for the good of all and to be ever on guard lest by some inadvertence we injure some other living creature,--such are some of the lessons upon which our philosopher insists as essential to man's happiness.

"If," he urges, in writing for the young, "there is any one point which, in six thousand years of thinking about right and wrong, wise and good men have agreed upon, or successively by experience discovered, it is that God dislikes idle and cruel people more than any others; that His first order is, 'Work while you have light;' and his second, 'Be merciful while you have mercy.' 'Work while you have light,' especially while you have the light of morning. There are few things more wonderful to me than that old people never tell young ones how precious their youth is.... Remember, then, that I, at least, have warned _you_, that the happiness of your life, and its power, and its part and rank in earth or in heaven, depend on the way you pass your days now. They are not to be sad days; far from that, the first duty of young people is to be delighted and delightful; but they are to be in the deepest sense solemn days. There is no solemnity so deep, to a rightly thinking creature, as that of dawn.... You must be to the best of your strength usefully employed during the greater part of the day, so that you may be able at the end of it to say, as proudly as any peasant, that you have not eaten the bread of idleness. Then, secondly, I said, you are not to be cruel. Perhaps you think there is no chance of your being so; and indeed I hope it is not likely that you should be deliberately unkind to any creature; but _unless you are deliberately kind to every creature, you will often be cruel to many_."

Ruskin is often disquieting to conventionalists; he is too candid to be popular with those who make long prayers and descant on charity while they ignore justice. He puts questions to them which they do not want to consider themselves, or to have others consider. By insisting on the substitution of justice for charity, and by taking the teachings of Jesus seriously, he offends the sleek money-changers who occupy choice pews in the modern palaces of ease dedicated to the lowly Nazarene. Such expressions as the following from the magnificent lecture on "Work" prove far less satisfying to this class than the popular sermons they are accustomed to hear:

"It is the law of heaven," says Ruskin, "that you shall not be able to judge what is wise or easy, unless you are first resolved to judge what is just, and to do it. That is the one thing constantly reiterated by our master--the order of all others that is given oftenest: 'Do justice and judgment.' That's your Bible order; that's the 'service of God.' The one divine work--the one ordered sacrifice--is to do justice; and it is the last we are ever inclined to do. Anything rather than that! As much charity as you choose, but no justice. 'Nay,' you will say, 'charity is greater than justice.' Yes, it is greater; _it is the summit of justice_; it is the temple of which justice is the foundation. _But you can't have the top without the bottom_; you cannot build upon charity. You must build upon justice, for this main reason, that you have not, at first, charity to build with. It is the last reward of good work. It is all very fine to think you can build upon charity to begin with; but you will find all you have got to begin with begins at home, and is essentially love of yourself.

"You well-to-do people, for instance, who are here to-night will go to 'Divine Service' next Sunday, all nice and tidy, and your little children will have their tight little Sunday boots on, and lovely little Sunday feathers in their hats; and you'll think, complacently and piously, how lovely they look! So they do; and you love them heartily, and you like sticking feathers in their hats. That's all right; that _is_ charity; but it is charity beginning at home. Then you will come to the poor little crossing-sweeper got up also--in its Sunday dress--the dirtiest rags it has that it may beg the better: we shall give it a penny, and think how good we are. That's charity going abroad. But what does justice say, walking and watching near us? Christian justice has been strangely mute, and seemingly blind; and, if not blind, decrepit this many a day: she keeps her accounts still, however--quite steadily--doing them at nights, carefully, with her bandage off, and through acutest spectacles (the only modern scientific invention she cares about). You must put your ear down ever so close to her lips to hear her speak; and then you will start at what she first whispers, for it will certainly be, 'Why shouldn't that little crossing-sweeper have a feather on its head, as well as your own child?' Then you may ask justice, in an amazed manner, How she can possibly be so foolish as to think children could sweep crossings with feathers on their heads? Then you stoop again, and justice says--still in her dull, stupid way--'Then, why don't you, every other Sunday, leave your child to sweep the crossing, and take the little sweeper to church in a hat and feather?' Mercy on us (you think), what will she say next? And you answer, of course, that you don't, because everybody ought to remain content in the position in which Providence has placed them.

"Ah, my friends, that's the gist of the whole question. _Did_ Providence put them in that position, or did _you_? You knock a man into a ditch, and then you tell him to remain content in the 'position in which Providence has placed him.' That's modern Christianity. You say, 'We did not knock him into the ditch.' How do you know what you have done or are doing? That's just what we have all got to know, and what we shall never know until the question with us every morning, is, not how to do the gainful thing, but how to do the just thing."

These thoughts suggest to us Ruskin, the social economist, for we must not lose sight of the fact that this greatest of all art critics, this strong, sane ethical philosopher who has emphasized so forcibly the possibilities, duties, and responsibilities of the individual in all his complex relations, is also one of the most enlightened and broad-visioned economists of our wonderful age. By treatises, essays, and letters he has striven for a brighter day for the breadwinners. He has sought to elevate the ideals and tastes of all toilers, while he has labored unremittingly to secure for them that meed of justice which is their right, but which has so long been denied them.

So far back as 1868, when few people of position dared advocate so sane a proposition as the governmental ownership of "natural monopolies," John Ruskin published these bold and thoughtful words in the London _Daily Telegraph_:

The ingenious British public seemed to be discovering to its cost, that the beautiful law of supply and demand does not apply in a pleasant manner to railroad transit. But if they are prepared to submit patiently to the "natural" laws of political economy, what right have they to complain? The railroad belongs to the shareholders; and has not everybody a right to ask the highest he can get for his wares? The public have a perfect right to walk, or to make other opposition railroads for themselves, if they please, but not to abuse the shareholders for asking as much as they think they can get. Will you allow me to put the _real_ rights of the matter before them in a few words?

Neither the roads nor the railroads of any nation should belong to any private persons. All means of public transit should be provided at public expense, by public determination, where such means are needed, and the public should be its own shareholder. Neither road, nor railroad, nor canal should ever pay dividends to anybody. They should pay their working expenses, and no more. All dividends are simply a tax on the traveller and the goods, levied by the persons to whom the road or canal belongs, for the right of passing over his property, and this right should at once be purchased by the nation, and the original cost of the roadway--be it of gravel, iron, or adamant--at once defrayed by the nation, and then the whole work of the carriage of persons or goods done for ascertained prices, by salaried officers, as the carriage of letters is done now.

Happily these suggestions of the distinguished Englishman have been followed, in part at least, by several enlightened nations, but to the disgrace of our republic, and to the great cost of the producing and consuming masses, we are lagging behind in these respects, becoming a camp-follower instead of a leader in the march of progress, because of the influence exerted by a small class, who have grown so powerful through special privileges given to them by the nation that they now assume to thwart beneficent legislation in order that they may continue to grow richer through this vicious form of governmental paternalism, which places the multitude in the power of a few.

Ruskin's views on money are as disturbing to the usurers and those who through special privileges in money have amassed fortunes of unearned wealth as his sound position on railroads is distasteful to the monopolists who impoverish the producer and consumer by exorbitant rates on transportation.

The great Englishman is also too clear-sighted to accept the fallacious doctrines of the money-changers in regard to the medium of exchange. He is too honest to hold his peace in the presence of a great wrong, hence his definition of money is far more nearly correct than the false and essentially injurious definitions so industriously promulgated by special pleaders for an interested class. "The final and best definition of money," says Ruskin, "is that it is a documentary promise ratified and guaranteed by the nation to give or find a certain quantity of labor on demand."

In 1873 our author carried on a spirited discussion with some conventional economists regarding the money of the rich. One writer undertook to defend the lavish and reckless expenditures of the wealthy by calling to his aid the well-worn plea that money thus paid out finds its way into the pockets of poor families, and that thus through the bounty of the rich the starving are blest. Ruskin, in the course of his reply, observed that, were he a poor man instead of a moderately rich one, he would be sure that the paper referred to would suggest the question:

These _means of living_, which this generous and useful gentleman is so fortunately disposed to bestow on me--where does he get them himself?... These are the facts. The laborious poor produce "the means of life" by their labor. Rich persons possess themselves by various expedients of a right to dispense these means of life, and, keeping as much means as they want for themselves, and rather more, dispense the rest usually only in return for _more labor from the poor_, expended in producing various delights for the rich dispenser. The idea is now gradually entering poor men's minds, that they may as well keep in their own hands the right of distributing "the means of life" they produce; and employ themselves, so far as they need extra occupation, for their own entertainment or benefit, rather than that of other people.

The conventional economist replied to the question relating to how the rich man got his wealth by stating that it was obtained by the possessor or his ancestors through a "mutually beneficent partnership" between the rich and the poor by which the poor had their share of the joint returns advanced to them. Mr. Ruskin in his reply stated the question again, and then proceeded to answer it by a telling personal illustration. He says: