the Japanese left, which was intended completely to surround Kuropatkin's army. The words were stricken out by the Emperor personally before the report was given to the press, and his object evidently was to prevent historical record of a great injustice done by General Nogi to himself. This deep consciousness of comparative inefficiency, and of moral responsibility therefor, Nogi never ceased to feel. In the later years of his life he often referred to it, and more than once said to his friends that the loss of his two sons seemed "almost a necessity, because only through this terrible bereavement could he answer to the spirits of the many brave men whom it had been his unhappy duty to send to death."

Such an attitude toward the dead and such a feeling of responsibility for personal errors that possibly increased the number of dead are foreign to all our modes of thought and all our standards of moral accountability; but they are quite in harmony with the spirit of Bushido and Old Japan, and Nogi must be judged by the feelings and beliefs of his teachers and contemporaries, not by feelings and beliefs that have been created by a different history and environment, and that prevail in a very different part of the world.

Another noteworthy trait of Nogi's character was his generosity to his enemies. In a recent article in The Outlook I referred to his extraordinary magnanimity in offering, at the unveiling of the Japanese monument to the Russian dead at Port Arthur, to conduct a Shinto religious service in honor of the spirits of the soldiers who, while living, had killed his sons and twenty or thirty thousand of his countrymen. An additional illustration

of this trait is to be found in a letter that he wrote to the Governor of Nagasaki just before General Stoessel and his officers were sent to that port at the end of the siege. It was in part as follows:

Sir: It has been arranged to send around by your port the Russian military men and officials who are returning to their country on parole. I do not doubt that you have received some official communication as to their treatment, but I desire to state my own views, for your information. It need hardly be said that persons released on parole are not prisoners, neither are they enemies. They are merely foreigners who have performed loyal service in their country's cause. So long as combat continued, due vigilance, of course, had to be exercised; but I trust that the officials and the people of my country will not now regard these men as prisoners. They should be treated with humanity and the fullest courtesy.

Six years after this letter was written-in 1911-General Nogi spent a day or two in St. Petersburg, on his way to London, where he went to represent his Emperor at the coronation of George V. While in the capital of the Czar's Empire he did not forget, nor neglect, to lay a wreath of fresh flowers on the grave of General Kondratenko, one of the bravest and most skillful of the Russian officers with whom he had fought at Port Arthur. These incidents may seem unimportant; but they help to show what manner of man General Nogi was, and what his attitude was toward the spirits of the dead who died for Japan and the dead who died for Russia.

After the war General Nogi returned to Tokyo, where the great popular ovation that he received showed conclusively the depth and sincerity of the people's respect, sympa thy, and love. In 1911 he went to London to attend the coronation of George V, but during the five or six years that followed the war he lived quietly in Tokyo, attending to his duties as military counselor, taking an active interest in affairs of state, but doing nothing to attract particular attention. On the 30th of July the whole Empire was shocked and plunged into the deepest grief by the death of the Emperor Mutsuhito. On the 13th of September-forty-five days later -General Nogi stabbed himself in the throat and the Countess Nogi killed herself by sep puku just as the firing of a gun in the palace grounds announced that the body of the Emperor had begun its journey to the grave. No event in recent years has made a more dramatic and tragic impression upon the world, and none has been followed by more inquiry, conjecture, approval, and condemnation. Like Tolstoy's abandonment of his home and death in a railway station at Astapova, it has caused the whole world to ask, Why?" In the absence of any positive information with regard to the Nogis' intentions and reasons, it is difficult to suggest any adequate psychological explanation of their action; but it may be possible to throw some light upon the history of suicide in Japan, and upon the social and traditional environment which has made self-destruction there a very different thing from self-destruction here.

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In order to understand, however, the Japanese attitude toward suicide, we must divest ourselves, as far as possible, of our Own inherited and acquired beliefs, and try to look

at the matter from the view-point of a people who have never regarded suicide as essentially, inherently, and in all cases a crime. Suicide in Japan has always and everywhere been regarded as sometimes justifiable. Throughout the feudal period seppuku, or self-disembowelment, was enforced in the samurai class as a punishment for certain kinds of offenses; but this association with crime never made it disgraceful per se. Death by suicide continued to be honorable and, in certain cases, praiseworthy. When a bushi, or knight, was forced to a choice between two lines of conduct, one of which involved the sacrifice of principle and the other the sacrifice of life, he chose the latter without a moment's hesitation, and put himself to death with perfect coolness and dignity. Life, in the West, has almost invariably been put first in the list of desirables. Life, in Japan, has always been regarded as insignificant when balanced against any one of a dozen other things. Loyalty was better than life: the faithful performance of duty was better than life; the sacrifice of one's own interests to the interests of one's lord was better than life; the preservation of personal honor and dignity was better than life. was of value only when it was compatible with certain ideals of conduct. It may be said that these ideals of conduct were artificial, unreasonable, or even fantastic; but that does not affect the fundamental difference between the Eastern man and the Western man in the attitude of each toward life.

Life

The Eastern man (I now refer particularly to the samurai) was always ready to die for the thing that seemed to him worth while and there were many such things. The Western man is also ready to die for the thing that seems to him worth while-but there are few such things. The worth-while things in the East and the West differ as widely as does the attitude of the East and West, respectively, toward suicide as a means of attaining the worth-while things or avoiding the things that seem to be vitally injurious or disgraceful.

Suicide, as a means of attracting attention to what seem to be insupportable evils and exciting public feeling against them, has been practiced in Japan for centuries. As late as 1891 Ohara Takeyoshi, a lieutenant in the Yezo militia, committed suicide in front of the graves of his ancestors in Tokyo as a protest against what he thought was the

indifference of the Japanese Government to Russian encroachments in the north. His explanation was that he thought "an appeal from the grave would move men's hearts more surely than any arguments urged by a living voice." After the Japanese-Chinese War, when Japan gave up Port Arthur and allowed it to be occupied by the Russians, no fewer than forty Japanese army officers committed suicide by seppuku.

This ideal of conduct may seem strange to us, but it is not incomprehensible, and there have been analogous cases even in the West. I knew a young married woman in Siberia a political offender-who was condemned to death while pregnant, but who concealed her condition in order that she might be hanged with her unborn child. Her sentence would have been commuted if the authorities had known all the facts, but she was ready to commit what was virtually suicide because she thought that the horror of such an execution would raise a storm of popular indignation and protest against Russian governmental methods. How does this case differ in principle from the suicide of Ohara Takeyoshi and the officers of the Japanese army? And yet it is not an Oriental case. We are undoubtedly right in condemning Japanese suicide; but let us not misunderstand it, nor ignore the fact that the principle which underlies it-the insignificance of life in comparison with certain other things-is not to be condemned without qualification. It is a principle that has given firmness and strength to the Japanese character, and that has produced many men of the Nogi type-the type of Old Japan. How strong devotion to this principle has been in Japan we may see from the action of the lower house of the Japanese Parliament upon a proposal, made as late as 1869, to prohibit seppuku and abolish it altogether. Two hundred members out of two hundred and nine voted against the proposal, and six refrained from voting. The speakers who defended seppuku declared that it was "the very shrine of the Japanese national spirit and the embodiment in practice of devotion to principle." The spirit of Japan has changed since then, but it still remains unchanged in a few men of the Nogi type.

In very early, almost prehistoric, times the custom of jun-shi, or dying with the master, led to the interment of living Japanese retainers with their dead lord. This custom gradually died out, but voluntary suicide as

a means of showing personal devotion or attachment to a master or superior persisted for many centuries. In 1614, for example,

three of the retainers of the Prince of Hirado killed themselves by seppuku, in order to "bear their dead lord company.' ." There have been hundreds of similar cases in more recent times. General Nogi is said to have left a letter to be given to the new Emperor. When that letter is published, if it ever be published, we shall probably know definitely the reasons for the writer's suicide. Meanwhile I may perhaps venture to express the opinion that Nogi's act was not an act of weakness, nor a result of melancholia, nor an evidence of unbalanced mind. He never was weak in his life; he never allowed himself to be crushed by grief; and in the fortyfive days that followed the death of his friend and master he never showed the least sign of mental derangement. So long as the body of the Emperor remained unburied, and so long as Nogi could render any service to his dead lord, he acted with perfect self-possession, calmness, and intelligence. When all

was over, when there was nothing more to do, he ended his own life as an expression of his boundless devotion to the man whom he had loved. It was in the spirit of Old Japan, but Nogi was a man of that era, and lived in the mental and moral atmosphere of that time. In order to understand, dimly at least,

the underlying principle of the act it is only necessary to imagine that the inherited beliefs and the social order of Old Japan which sanctioned and approved the death of Nogi in Tokyo were just as strong and just as compelling as were the inherited beliefs and the social order which sanctioned and approved the death of Straus, Millet, Astor, and Butt on the sloping decks of the sinking Titanic. It is not so much a difference in men as it is a difference in beliefs, traditions, ideals of conduct, and the social order. We may not approve the spirit of Old Japan, but by putting ourselves mentally in the places of the samurai of Old Japan we may at least understand it.

As for the suicide of the Countess Nogi, it is only a proof that the devotion of a Japanese wife to her husband is just as deep and strong as the devotion of an American wife to her husband. Mrs. Straus, on the Titanic, refused to leave Mr. Straus to die alone; and the Countess Nogi, in the modest little house in Akasaki, determined in the same spirit to share her husband's fate. Both women were faithful and devoted, and both had the . strength and the courage that faithfulness and devotion give. The tombstone over the grave of the Nogis should bear the words from Bushido which describe their ideals— Loyalty, Duty, Faithfulness, Courage, Devotion, and Self-sacrifice.

O

NCE more New York City has set the Nation by nose and ears with a scandal of police corruption. This time its noisomeness has reached even beyond the seas. The cities of the Old World, no less than those of the New, are aghast at the revelations concerning blackmailing policemen and toll-paying crime which cable and telegraph have been carrying to them since July 16 last. The exposé is as much a part of the daily news of London and Paris as it is of San Francisco and Detroit. London rhymesters are not behind those of Chicago in making it the subject of pertinent and impertinent verse. Berlin and Los Angeles are cartooning it.

To foreigners the revealed coalition between crime and those vested with the authority of suppressing it is but one of the many startling phenomena of which they are accustomed to read in our American life and institutions. To us it has never been a . phenomenon. It is, and has been, a problem these past fifty years, whose solution we have, with becoming hypocrisy, sporadically attempted. It is not the problem of New York City alone, but of every city above the third class in the United States.

It is more than a problem. It is a disease. It has been diagnosed times without number, most notably in New York City by the Lexow Committee of 1894, and by the Mazet Committee of 1899. Hardly a day passes without the news carrying evidence of its existence in one or more cities. Hardly a municipal election is held without this disease, in one phase or another, proving the source of a determining "moral or immoral issue. The latest manifestation of our police disease, or diseased police, was shot into the world's attention at two o'clock of the morning of July 16, 1912, when the Camorra of the Department of Police of the city of New York assassinated a State's witness who within a few hours was to have given to the public prosecutor proof in corroboration of charges of blackmail and official oppression which he had previously made.

This witness was a gambler named Herman Rosenthal. He was a product of New

See in connection with this article an editorial.elsewhere in this issue.-THE EDITORS.

York's East Side, who began life as a newsboy. According to his own sworn statement, he, as a lad of seventeen, went weekly to a police station and paid $25 for the privilege of running a game without molestation. That was twenty years ago.

In November, 1911, Herman Rosenthal made the acquaintance of Charles Becker, a lieutenant of police, and then commander of the "Strong-Arm Squad," a police body accustomed to lawless acts and practices, which is supposed to deal with the suppression of gambling and disorderly houses and gangs. Oppression and not suppression is the record of this and all similar squads.

New Year's eve last found Rosenthal and his wife, Becker and his wife, who is a public school teacher, and a number of others at a dinner in the club of a fraternal order. This festive occasion seems to have served to seal a friendship, or at least an understanding, between gambler and police officer.

New York had been and was notoriously "wide open." By that it is to be understood that houses of ill fame and gaming were plying their trades successfully, and that crimes of trick, fraud, and device, designed to relieve bucolic strangers and muddle-brained natives of pocket-burning cash, were the order of the day. All of this notwithstanding apparently persistent "raiding "-dust always for the eyes of the gullible-which resulted in no corrective convictions.

a

Herman Rosenthal was ambitious to be

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big gambler "-one of the uptown fellows who may make a fortune in a night. He wished to be of the Tenderloin aristocracy. There are classes even in the underworld. Caste lines are drawn as rigidly there as they are in the haut monde.

March saw Herman Rosenthal established as the proprietor of a house in the gamblers' Golconda-New York's Tenderloin. His place was in a block in West Forty-fifth Street where, at that time, one couldn't throw a rock without breaking the window of a gaming den.

On April 15 Becker and his squad "raided " Rosenthal's house, during the proprietor's absence. Among those arrested was a boy, nephew of Rosenthal's wife. Thereafter a policeman was stationed on the premises

night and day. This is a common and lawless form of police oppression. As the lessee and legal tenant, Rosenthal would have been within his rights to have employed any necessary force to have ejected these But Rosenthal did not think police invaders. of the law any more than his police oppressors thought of the law. The gambler saw all around him carrying on their games. He saw houses raided" and resume "business" before the echo of the footsteps of the raiders died away. No policemen were stationed in them. By devious ways he sought to have the guards removed, but his place had been singled out as a mark. It was plain that forces were at work to drive him back to the East Side. Nobody wanted his protection" money. The reason has not

yet been demonstrated by evidence. But one should keep the fact in mind that Rosenthal was an alien in the Tenderloin.

He was

The arrest of Mrs. Rosenthal's nephew by Becker became an aggravating sore in the situation which confronted the gambler. Why will appear in a moment. Rosenthal went about the Tenderloin contending that it was unjust, illegal, a "frame-up;" that the boy had been neither player nor employee; that he had been simply visiting Mrs. Rosenthal when the raiders entered the house. Debt began to oppress Rosenthal. Cupidity and jealousy became the stokers of the fire which was blazing within him. Of that fire the mighty power of revenge was born. He would pull down the temple though it destroyed him. He had something to tell. He sought the Mayor's ear. He was turned away. He sought the ear of the Commissioner of Police. He was turned away. He sought legal advice. He was counseled to cause the arrest of the precinct police commanders responsible for stationing trespassers upon his premises. He made a complaint of oppression before a police magistrate. Warrants were denied him. Summonses were denied him. He sought the ear of the District Attorney, and at last won an official's attention.

Rosenthal in an affidavit told the prose

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cutor that he had opened a gambling-house in the Tenderloin by and with the connivance of Lieutenant Becker; that Becker's share of the proceeds was twenty per cent, that Becker had stationed his blackmail collector, 'Jack " Rose, in the house as an overseer of the earnings; that Becker had told him shortly before the raid that their friendship had become known at police headquarters and that to save his position he must raid the Rosenthal house; that he told Becker to go ahead that when he protested against the stationing of a patrolman on the premises following the raid, Becker told him he was helpless to do anything; that forces higher up were behind that oppression; that in order to salve the sting Becker canceled a loan of $1,500, which money he had advanced at the time of the opening of the house; that Becker was a grafter and that the District Attorney could easily substantiate this with the means of investigation at his command; that the prosecutor could establish, so far as the gambling-houses of the city were concerned, that there was a fixed scale of police toll (this is a National fact, with variance only in amount)-$500 to open a house for faro and roulette games and $300 a month to operate it, $500 to open a poolroom for afternoon play and $300 a month to operate, $50 to $250 a month (according to the proceeds) to operate a crap game, and $50 to $100 a month (according to the proceeds) to operate a poker club. In a few words Rosenthal painted Becker as without parallel in the long line of police wolves who had grown rich preying upon crime. The lieutenant's bank accounts would prove what he said. He asserted that he had learned of the amount of graft Becker was collecting from the lieutenant's own lips. He was willing to go before the Grand Jury and tell his story. He was willing to bring other witnesses to the fore to corroborate what he said.

There had been no secrecy about Rosenthal's moves. It was known that he had tried in vain to see the Mayor and the Commissioner of Police. The proceedings covering his application for summonses or warrants for the precinct police commanders had been public. He went forth from the District Attorney boasting that at last he had found somebody in authority who would listen to him. He told the newspapers about ́it. The issues of July 16 printed most of what he had told the prosecutor, and which I have here summarized. Rosenthal stayed up