"About England and Japan," replied the Count.
As a matter of fact, in the course of a rambling conversation, Count Saito had asked his guest:
"Now, what strikes you as the most surprising difference between our two countries?"
Geoffrey pondered for a moment. He wanted to answer frankly, but he was still awed by the canons of Good Form. At last he said: "This Yoshiwara business."
"But that is just a local difference in the manner of regulating a universal problem," he said.
"Englishmen aren't any better than they should be," said Geoffrey; "but we don't like to hear of women put up for sale like things in a shop."
"Then you have not actually seen them yourself?" said the Count. He could not help smiling at the characteristic British habit of criticising on hearsay.
"Not actually; but I saw the procession last month."
"You really think that it is better to let immoral women stray about the streets without any attempt to control them and the crime and disease they cause?"
"It's not that," said Geoffrey; "it seems to me horrible that women should be put up to sale and exposed in shop windows ticketed and priced."
"I see that you are an idealist like so many Englishmen. But I am only a practical statesman. The problem of vice is a problem of government. No law can abolish it. It is for us statesmen to study how to restrain it and its evil consequences. Three hundred years ago these women used to walk about the streets as they do in London to-day. Tokugawa Iyeyasu, the greatest of all Japanese statesmen, who gave peace to the whole country, put in order this untidiness also. He had the Yoshiwara built, and he put all the women there, where the police could watch both them and the men who visited them. The English might learn from us here, I think. But you are an unruly people. It is not only that you object for ideal reasons to the imprisonment of these women; but it is your men who would object very strongly to having the eye of the policeman watching them when they paid their visits."
Geoffrey was silenced by the experience of his host. He was afraid, as most Englishmen are, of arguing that the British determination to ignore vice, however disastrous in practice, is a system infinitely nobler in conception than the acquiescence which admits for the evil its right to exist, and places it among the commonplaces of life.