Loyalty, Manliness, Principle
Loyalty, Manliness, Principle.—Jeremiah reproved his people of their disloyalty by holding before them the loyalty of the Rechabites to the principles of their father. Even so Christians may learn a good lesson from the Japanese. Mr. Clough, a newspaper correspondent of note, tells us that in China one can buy the profoundest State secret for a hundred taels; in Europe and America such secrets can be gotten by other means; but in Japan a monarch's ransom would not corrupt the meanest coolie to betray in any way his country's secret or honor. It is a noble trait of character. So Christians ought to regard the interests of God's cause. Again: it is a notorious fact that among soldiers, as a rule, are found many drunken, boisterous men, and this is especially manifest in invasions of foreign countries. But not so Japan. This is what Jack London, an American, says of the Japanese soldiers in Seoul, Korea:— I doubt if there be more peaceable, orderly soldiers in the world than the Japanese. Our own soldiers, long ere this, would have painted Seoul red with their sky-larking and good-natured boisterousness, but the Japanese are not boisterous. They are deadly serious. Yet no one of the civilian population is afraid of them. The women are safe; the money is safe; the goods are safe. The Japanese established a reputation in 1894 for paying for whatever they took, and they are living up to that reputation. "But if they were the Russians"—say the Koreans, and the European and American residents ominously shake their heads. I have yet to see one drunken Japanese soldier. Not one disorderly or even boisterous one have I seen—and they are soldiers. All honor to them for their loyalty, their manliness, their unswerving adherence to those principles. We wish they were Christians. How noble indeed would be these principles sanctified.