The Japanese by G.K. Chesterton — Read

Is it not time that we western people protested against being perpetually browbeaten with the high morality of the Orient -- especially of Japan? I remember a curious occasion some years ago when certain able journalists on a Socialist paper in Fleet Street suddenly burst into a blazing excitement about King Asoka. Their relations with this prince could not be called intimate; in point of fact, he died some thousands of years ago somewhere in the middle of Asia. But it seemed that in him we had lost our only reliable moral guide. Religion was a failure, and human life, on the whole, a tragedy; but King Asoka was all right. He was faultlessly just, infinitely merciful, the mirror of the virtues, the prop of the poor. Outsiders were naturally interested in the sources of this revelation. And after some discussion it was discovered and mildly pointed out that this description of the King's virtues is only found on a few of the King's own official inscriptions.

Old Asoka may have been a very nice man, but we have only his own word for it that he was so nice as all that. And even in the benighted West it might not be impossible to find monarchs who were very just and mighty according to their own proclamations; and courts that were quite exemplary in the _Court Circular_. It had never struck these simple Asokites in Fleet Street that the pompous enunciation of ideals probably meant no more in Bengal than in Birmingham, in the ancient East than in the modern West. It is as if a Hindoo should say that under the sublime French monarchy every King had to be a good Christian; for he was called on coins and parchments "the most Christian King."