TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
Kumamoto, April, 1893.

Dear Hendrick,— ... You never wrote a more wonderful letter than that last letter full of penetrating things. Now one of my shortcomings is a total ignorance of practical worldly wisdom;—for instance, I could not sit down and talk to a man in polite enigmas which both of us would understand, at all. All that world of business is to me a mystery and a marvel incomprehensible. Moreover, it is the revelation of mental powers of a very subtle order, as much beyond me as mathematics,—so that I cannot but respect the forces manifested, even if I deplore the directions in which they are sometimes exercised. Your sketch of the two men, and the interview, and the psychological relations was perfectly delicious,—and like nearly everything you write to me, gave me the pleasure of a novel sensation....

Your criticism about ——’s criticism was not exactly what I thought you might make:—it is true that we like to be thought, and to believe ourselves, capable of doing vast harm, and credit ourselves more for our goodness perhaps on account of that belief. But I don’t agree with you in thinking the remark uncomplimentary. I think it was true, and in the sense I take it, beautiful. Ask yourself could you really do anything you knew to be terribly cruel under any personal provocation,—at least after the first burst of sudden anger was over? And you will find you could not. Any nature sincerely sympathetic—with a complex nerve-system—cannot inflict pain without receiving at least as much, if not more pain than it gives. I believe you could kill a man, under just provocation; but that is not bad, or cruel—indeed, it might be a duty. The terrible men are the men who do everything in cold blood, icily, with calculation, infinite patience, and infinite pleasure. But the capacity to be thus dangerous means also a low development of those qualities which give sweetness to character and amiability to life,—and chivalry to a man’s soul.

Now here is the very immoral side of Western civilization. Being wholly aggressive and selfish, the hard, cold qualities of character are being prodigiously developed by it. The emotional qualities, you might suggest, are also indirectly developed by the suffering the others inflict;—there is action and reaction. Yes, that is true. But the terrible men—the men of the type of that manager—represent not only a constantly increasing class, but a leading one—the class whose name is Power. Now Power multiplies. In wealth and luxury multiplication is rapid and facile. They are less fertile comparatively than other classes; but the cost of their individuality is infinitely greater, and one type can outlive, outwork, outplan a hundred of the emotional sort,—as a general rule. The ultimate tendency is to settle all power in the hands of those without moral scruple. It may take another few centuries to do this; but the tendency is obvious, and the danger is steadily growing. I think the West can never become as moral as the Orient. But it may become infinitely more wicked.

This is one way of seeing the matter. Another I wrote you about in my last letter,—the sexual question in the West,—something never dreamed of in the East. What must be the ultimate results of this Western worship of the Eternal Feminine? Must not one be, the contempt of old age, and universal irreverence for things the most naturally deserving of reverence? Already, in the West, the Family has almost ceased to exist.

To an Oriental it seems utterly monstrous that grown-up children should not live with their father, mother, and grandparents, and support and love them more than their own children, wives, or husbands. It seems to him sheer wickedness that a man should not love his mother-in-law,—or that he should love his own wife even half as well as his own father or mother. Our whole existence seems to him disgustingly immoral. He would deem worthy of death the man who wrote—

“He stood on his head on the wild seashore,

And joy was the cause of the act;—

For he felt, as he never had felt before,