entirely new literature. This literature was, of course, deeply influenced by Western models. It was so decidedly modern that many of its ideas might have been those of contemporary Russians, Frenchmen, or Englishmen. At the same time, this literature was too good and too sincere to be simply imitative. It was a distinctly Japanese creation, telling the story of the average middle class people with realism, sometimes with deep psychological analysis, and often with considerable humor. In the hands of a master like the novelist Natsume Soseki, a university professor of English, it was a great literature, worthy of standing beside the finest literary works of the Western world. Its appearance toward the end of the Meiji period clearly indicated that, even while the oligarchy ruled, an intellectual class was growing up which was free of the feudal mentality inherited from the Tokugawa and was thinking in terms quite foreign to the oligarchs.
Side by side with the new intellectual class and to some degree merging with it was a second group, also developing opinions divergent from the ruling oligarchy. This group consisted of business men and financiers, who, although in large part made up of former samurai and Daimyo, tended to be more interested in taxes and profits than in military strength and colonial expansion.
The business men had joined with the lesser government officials excluded from the oligarchy in clamoring for a larger voice in the government, and the creation of the Diet in 1890 gave them a place in politics which they gradually improved. Political parties at first had centered completely around the old oli-