Again, it is certain that Ieyasu had the support of the merchant classes in the administrative reforms which he established. Even the closing of the country to foreign trade by the Government of his grandson Iemitsu was effected without much protest. The truth is that the closing of the Japanese ports to foreign commerce touched no vested Japanese interests. The volume of trade was very small: the millions of Japan had no use for the articles which Europe had to bring them, and the products of the country, after those long years of anarchy and trouble, were not much greater than what the nation needed for its own private consumption. The Southern Daimyos, crushed and crippled, had no longer any need for the guns and military ammunition which the Portuguese had brought a century before, and whatever was needed in this line was made by the Japanese themselves. The closing of the ports to foreign ships injured no one at the moment; it only prevented the creation of new and artificial wants among the people, and the merchants were quite content to have it so. In the development of the internal commerce, which has always been a great feature in the mercantile life of the country, they could see their profits before them. They wanted peace and a steady market, and Ieyasu's administration assured them both.

And the Buddhists were contented; for Buddhism has always been a merchants' religion, and in the prosperity of the commercial classes there would always be something to spare for the alms-bowl of the mendicant friar. They had good reason to be quite satisfied. Ieyasu did not treat them as Nobunaga or Hideyoshi had done. He summoned them to his councils; he invited them to instruct him in the tenets of their religion; he professed himself a convert to the Tendai sect; he decorated his

new capital with magnificent temples ; and he gave the Buddhist clergy considerable inquisitorial powers by making them his registrars, charged with the special surveillance of persons suspected of Christianity.

Allied with the Buddhists were the Confucianists and the Shintoists. The former of these had, as we have already had more than one occasion to mention, always cultivated good relationships with the Zen priests. These relationships were much strengthened by Chinese refugees, who came over to Japan after the fall of the Ming dynasty, and more especially by Ingen and the priests of the Chinese Zen sect of Obaku, whom I mentioned in my last chapter. Priests of other sects likewise professed themselves followers of the Chinese sages, and many a Confucianist scholar shaved his head and entered a monastery in order that he might thus, in greater quietness, prosecute his favourite studies. But the political wisdom of the Tokugawa Government led to the establishment of schools and colleges, such as the Shoheiko in Yedo (intimately