as Nobunaga had done, but he contrived to make it sing to his tune. In establishing himself in Nobunaga's place, and in extending his authority over the rest of the Empire, he used the arts of diplomacy much more than of military compulsion. His aim, as Murdoch says, was "not to kill two birds with one stone, but to use the same missile for the purpose of laming a considerable number of fowls, whom he would then catch and train to lay golden eggs for his own advantage." He did occasionally use the sword, and then with a cruelty which even Nobunaga might have envied. When he slew his nephew and adopted son, Hidetsugu, and hacked his whole family to pieces, he showed how monstrously cruel he was capable of being, should political expediency demand drastic measures. But he always stood ready to temper his cruelty by wise diplomacy. Thus he stormed and destroyed the great Shingon Temple-Fortress of Negoro, in Kii, with its four thousand armed bonzes, but he spared the Mother-Temple of Koya, and practically made the Shignon priests serve him in the capacity of warders of a prison for political offenders. He laid a very heavy hand on the Monto priests, but, having done so, he used Kennio Kosa, who had contrived to escape Nobunaga's massacre of the bonzes at Osaka, as a political agent of his own in the territories of the Satsuma Daimyo. When he thought that he had reason to fear the influence of the Jesuits (as before he had seen reason to fear Hidetsugu), he suddenly dropped his mask of friendship and ordered the execution of the twenty-six victims who were crucified on the Martyrs' Mount at Nagasaki on the 5th of February, 1597. Yet, to

the end of his life, Hideyoshi understood how to use the Christians and their teachers for his own purposes, and Konishi's Christian Brigade did yeoman service for him in Korea.