foreigners who first landed at the treaty ports in 1859, on inquiring
about the methods of the Japanese Government, the laws and their
administration, found that everything was veiled behind a vague
embodiment of something which was called "the Law." What that law was,
by whom enacted, and under what sanctions enforced, no one could tell;
though all seemed to stand in awe of it as something of superhuman
efficiency. Its mysteriousness was only equalled by the abject
submission which it received.

Foreign diplomatists, on trying to deal with the seat and source of
authority, instead of seeing the real head of power, played, as it were,
a game of chess against a mysterious hand stretched out from behind a
curtain. Morally, the whole tendency of such a dual system of exclusion
and of inclusion was to make a nation of liars, foster confirmed habits
of deceit, and create a code of politeness vitiated by insincerity.

With such repression of the natural powers of humanity, it was but in
accordance with the nature of things that licentiousness should run
riot, that on the fringes of society there should be the outcast and the
pariah, and that the social waste of humanity by prostitution, by
murder, by criminal execution under a code that prescribed the death
penalty for hundreds of offences, should be enormous. It is natural also
that in such a state of society population[7] should be kept down within
necessary limits, not only by famine, by the restraints of feudalism, by
legalized murder in the form of vendetta, by a system of prostitution
that made and still makes Japan infamous, by child murder, by lack of
encouragement given to feeble or malformed children to live, and by
various devices known to those who were ingenious in keeping up so
artificial a state of society.