The law represents that modicum of morality which can be squeezed out of the ruck of mankind; but what is that to me, who aim higher and seek to be my own more stringent judge?
I observe with pleasure that no brave man has ever given a rush for such considerations.

The Japanese have a nobler and more sentimental feeling for this social bond into which we all are born when we come into the world, and whose comforts and protection we all indifferently share throughout our lives:--but even to them, no more than to our Western saints and heroes, does the law of the state supersede the higher law of duty.

Without hesitation and without remorse, they transgress the stiffest enactments rather than abstain from doing right.

But the accidental superior duty being thus fulfilled, they at once return in allegiance to the common duty of all citizens; and hasten to denounce themselves; and value at an equal rate their just crime and their equally just submission to its punishment.
The evading of the police will not long satisfy an active conscience or a thoughtful head.

But to show you how one or the other may trouble a man, and what a vast extent of frontier is left unridden by this invaluable eighth commandment, let me tell you a few pages out of a young man's life.
He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous, flighty, as variable as youth itself, but always with some high motions and on the search for higher thoughts of life.