Note (return) — Chapter XII · - TWO CENTURIES OF SILENCE
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Such a policy, reminds one of the Amherst agricultural experiment in which bands of iron were strapped around a much-afflicted squash, in order to test vital potency. It recalls the pretty little story of Picciola, in which a tender plant must grow between the interstices of the bricks in a prison yard. Besides the potent bonds of the only orthodox Confucian philosophy which was allowed and the legally recognized religions, there was gradually formed a marvellous system of legislation, that turned the whole nation into a secret society in which spies and hypocrites flourished like fungus on a dead log. Besides the unwritten code of private law,4 that is, the local and general customs founded on immemorial usage, there was that peculiar legal system framed by Iyéyasŭ, bequeathed as a legacy and for over two hundred years practically the supreme law of the land.