bow before the illegitimate Manshu dynasty, and who now, in his Japanese retreat, imbued Mitsukuni's undertaking with a spirit of legitimacy. The whole of this colossal work was not finished until 1908, after a chequered history of one hundred and fifty years. Its volumes, as they appeared, taught the country to appreciate rightly the great wrongs that had been done to the Imperial House by Minamoto, Hojo, and Ashikaga, to acknowledge the rightful succession of the South at the time of the Rival Dynasties, to feel for Go-daigo, to applaud the loyalty of the brave Masashige. It was but natural for the reader to pass on to the question of the legitimacy of the Tokugawa Dictatorship. One by one, converts were gained for the new Crusade; it was not without danger that such principles were enounced in the face of the hard-handed tyrants of Yedo; many of the bolder spirits fell as martyrs in the good cause; when at last, in 1867, the crisis came, and the Emperor claimed his rightful inheritance, the heir of the Mito Tokugawas was to be found fighting for the principles of legitimacy against his kinsman the Shogun.

With the loyalists must be also reckoned the men who wished to see, not merely the Restoration of the Imperial power, but also that of the old national Shinto. Kado Azumamaro (1668-1736), Kamo Mabuchi (1697-1769), Moto-ori Norinaga (1730-1801), and Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843), are all names of persons well known among their countrymen for their painstaking boldness in the elucidation of the ancient chronicles, the Kojiki and Nihongi, and in the enunciation of loyalistic principles. The well-known story of the Forty-seven Ronin derives

its interest to the Japanese from its connection with the slow struggle between Emperor and Shogun, with which it was indirectly connected.

Another group, not to be neglected, was the small band of Dutch scholars. The policy of the Shogunate had left one little loophole, the Dutch factory at Deshima, for the entrance of Western thought. The books and scientific instruments, which thus came into the country, sufficed to keep alive in many hearts the eager desire for a wider and less restricted intercourse with the wonderful, because unknown, nations of the West.

All these elements combined against the Shogunate and its allies, the Buddhist congregations. In the course of the two centuries between the accession of Iemitsu and the arrival of Commodore Perry, the Shogunal Government had lost its predominant military strength, and the Buddhists that chastened meekness which had marked them after Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu had taken them well in hand. Neither was as strong as it had once been, and neither was generally popular. Commodore Perry's arrival was the occasion, but not the cause, of the successful Restoration of the Imperial Power. It would have come in any case, for the simple reason that intelligent Japan was agreed in wanting it.