JAPAN
faith and authority. Mutual confidence among officials renders all things possible of accomplishment; want of confidence between Sovereign and subject makes failure inevitable.
10. Anger is to be curbed, wrath cast away. The faults of another should not rouse our resentment. Every man's tendency is to follow the bent of his own inclination. If one is right, the other is wrong. But neither is perfect. Both are victims of passion and prejudice, and no one has exclusive competence to distinguish the evil from the good. Sagacity is balanced by silliness; small qualities are combined with great, so that neither is salient in the total, even as a sphere is without angles. To chide a fault does not certainly prevent its repetition, nor can the censor himself be secure against error. The sure road to accomplishment is that trodden by the people in combination.
14. Those in authority should never harbour hatred or jealousy of one another. Hate begets hate, and jealousy is without discernment. A wise man may be found once in five hundred years; a true sage, hardly once in a thousand. Yet without sages no country can be governed peacefully.
15. The imperative duty of man in his capacity of subject is to sacrifice his private interest to the public good. Egoism forbids coöperation, and without coöperation there cannot be any great achievement.Prince Shotoku spoke with the wisdom inspired by Buddhism and Confucianism. But the principles of constitutional monarchism that he enunciated so plainly were suggested by the conditions of his era. The patriarchal families which filled the principal offices of State by hereditary right, had grown into great clans.
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