But one may go a step farther in this matter of the family, and by so doing fare still worse with respect to individuality. There are certain customs in vogue among these peoples which would seem to indicate that even so generic a thing as the family is too personal to serve them for ultimate social atom, and that in fact it is only the idea of the family that is really important, a case of abstraction of an abstract. These suggestive customs are the far-eastern practices of adoption and abdication.
Adoption, with us, is a kind of domestic luxury, akin to the keeping of any other pets, such as lap-dogs and canaries. It is a species of self-indulgence which those who can afford it give themselves when fortune has proved unpropitious, an artificial method of counteracting the inequalities of fate. That such is the plain unglamoured view of the procedure is shown by the age at which the object is adopted. Usually the future son or daughter enters the adoptive household as an infant, intentionally so on the part of the would-be parents. His ignorance of a previous relationship largely increases his relative value; for the possibility of his making comparisons in his own mind between a former state of existence and the present one unfavorable to the latter is not pleasant for the adopters to contemplate. He is therefore acquired young. The amusement derived from his company is thus seen to be distinctly paramount to all other considerations. No one cares so heartily to own a dog which has been the property of another; a fortiori of a child. It is clearly, then, not as a necessity that the babe is adopted. If such were the case, if like the ancient Romans all a man wanted was the continuance of the family line, he would naturally wait until the last practicable moment; for he would thus save both care and expense. In the Far East adoption is quite a different affair. There it is a genealogical necessity--like having a father or mother. It is, indeed, of almost more importance.
For the great desideratum to these peoples is not ancestors but descendants. Pedigrees in the land of the universal opposite are not matters of bequest but of posthumous reversion. A man is not beholden to the past, he looks forward to the future for inherited honors. No fame attaches to him for having had an illustrious grandfather. On the contrary, it is the illustrious grandson who reflects some of his own greatness back upon his grandfather. If a man therefore fail to attain eminence himself, he always has another chance in his descendants; for he will of necessity be ennobled through the merits of those who succeed him. Such is the immemorial law of the land. Fame is retroactive. This admirable system has only one objection: it is posthumous in its effect. An ambitious man who unfortunately lacks ability himself has to wait too long for vicarious recognition. The objection is like that incident to the making of a country seat out of a treeless plain by planting the same with saplings. About the time the trees begin to be worth having the proprietary landscape-gardener dies of old age. However, as custom permits a Far Oriental no ancestral growth of timber, he is obliged to lay the seeds of his own family trees. Natural offspring are on the whole easier to get, and more satisfactory when got. Hence the haste with which these peoples rush into matrimony.
If in despite of his precipitation fate perversely refuse to grant him children, he must endeavor to make good the omission by artificial means. He proceeds to adopt somebody. True to instinct, he chooses from preference a collateral relative. In some far-eastern lands he must so restrict himself by law. In Korea, for instance, he can only adopt an agnate and one of a lower generation than his own.
But in Japan his choice is not so limited. In so praiseworthy an act as the perpetuation of his unimportant family line, it is deemed unwise in that progressive land to hinder him from unconsciously bettering it by the way. He is consequently permitted to adopt anybody. As people are by no means averse to being adopted, the power to adopt whom he will gives him more voice in the matter of his unnatural offspring than he ever had in the selection of a more natural one.
The adopted changes his name, of course, to take that of the family he enters. As he is very frequently grown up and extensively known at the time the adoption takes place, his change of cognomen occasions at first some slight confusion among his acquaintance.
This would be no worse, however, than the change with us from the maid to the matron, and intercourse would soon proceed smoothly again if people would only rest content with one such domestic migration. But they do not. The fatal facility of the process tempts them to repeat it. The result is bewildering: a people as nomadic now in the property of their persons as their forefathers were in their real estate. A man adopts another to-day to unadopt him to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after.
So profoundly unimportant to them is their social identity, that they bandy it about with almost farcical freedom. Perhaps it is fitting that there should be some slight preparation in this world for a future transmigration of souls. Still one fails to conceive that the practice can be devoid of disadvantages even to its beneficiaries.
