ABSTRACT
To the foreign merchant this will seem to be trifling with a serious question-the most serious question, he will say, in the commercial relations, perhaps in the total relations, of Japan with the world. Nevertheless, it is almost certain that the Japanese merchant would, as a rule, be a much more honest and honourable trader if he were able. Indeed, it is not going too far to say in laudation of his virtues, that he would be glad to be able to be honest; for this is no more than saying that he would be glad to be rich, to have a substantial working capital, to have credit with the banks, to be a respectable member of society. At present he is poor ; he works-or speculates-from transaction to transaction ; he has no credit; it is doubtful if he is a respectable member of Japanese society. He is, to be sure, going the wrong way about establishing his credit and raising himself in the social scale by his conduct under contracts with the foreign importers, who speak about his shocking behaviour to all the world. But here the larger question enters : the Japanese merchants' very ignorance of the rightness of the right way, the morality of the moral, about the success of honesty as the best policy, suggests that which is perhaps as near the truth as you may get, this namely, that his carelessness about his bargain with the foreign merchant is not a separate or distinct sin, but merely a symptom. It is the symptom of a disease ; it is an outcrop at a particular point of a vein of inferior ore in the Japanese character-the character, at any rate, of the trading-class of the country.
