I should come to our third talk with a great curiosity to hear of
the last portion of the Rule, of the things that the samurai are
obliged to do.
There would be many precise directions regarding his health, and
rules that would aim at once at health and that constant exercise of
will that makes life good. Save in specified exceptional
circumstances, the samurai must bathe in cold water, and the men
must shave every day; they have the precisest directions in such
matters; the body must be in health, the skin and muscles and nerves
in perfect tone, or the samurai must go to the doctors of the order,
and give implicit obedience to the regimen prescribed. They must
sleep alone at least four nights in five; and they must eat with and
talk to anyone in their fellowship who cares for their conversation
for an hour, at least, at the nearest club-house of the samurai once
on three chosen days in every week. Moreover, they must read aloud
from the Book of the Samurai for at least ten minutes every day.
Every month they must buy and read faithfully through at least one
book that has been published during the past five years, and the
only intervention with private choice in that matter is the
prescription of a certain minimum of length for the monthly book or
books. But the full Rule in these minor compulsory matters is
voluminous and detailed, and it abounds with alternatives. Its aim
is rather to keep before the samurai by a number of sample duties,
as it were, the need of, and some of the chief methods towards
health of body and mind, rather than to provide a comprehensive
rule, and to ensure the maintenance of a community of feeling and
interests among the samurai through habit, intercourse, and a living
contemporary literature. These minor obligations do not earmark more
than an hour in the day. Yet they serve to break down isolations of
sympathy, all sorts of physical and intellectual sluggishness and
the development of unsocial preoccupations of many sorts.
Women samurai who are married, my double told me, must bear
children--if they are to remain married as well as in the
order--before the second period for terminating a childless marriage
is exhausted. I failed to ask for the precise figures from my double
at the time, but I think it is beyond doubt that it is from samurai
mothers of the Greater or Lesser Rule that a very large proportion
of the future population of Utopia will be derived. There is one
liberty accorded to women samurai which is refused to men, and that
is to marry outside the Rule, and women married to men not under the
Rule are also free to become samurai. Here, too, it will be manifest
there is scope for novels and the drama of life. In practice, it
seems that it is only men of great poietic distinction outside the
Rule, or great commercial leaders, who have wives under it. The
tendency of such unions is either to bring the husband under the
Rule, or take the wife out of it. There can be no doubt that these
marriage limitations tend to make the samurai something of an
hereditary class. Their children, as a rule, become samurai. But it
is not an exclusive caste; subject to the most reasonable
qualifications, anyone who sees fit can enter it at any time, and
so, unlike all other privileged castes the world has seen, it
increases relatively to the total population, and may indeed at last
assimilate almost the whole population of the earth.