with the decline of the Diet, elections meant less and less. Whether they won elections or not, the party politicians were gradually losing all control of the government. Some cabinets even excluded party men altogether, and those politicians who did not swing around to timid support of the extreme militarists found it best to abandon political life, or at least to keep silent. Even the Social Mass Party of city intellectuals and white collar workers, swayed by the dominant currents of the day, developed certain fascist leanings. Eventually, the parties were dissolved completely, and the only opposition the Cabinet then had to fear from the Diet was an occasional pointed question from some brave liberal politician left over from an earlier age.
The big business interests, which had stood behind the party politicians, soon made their own compromise with the militarists. Business meant far more to them than ideals. The militarists, in seizing Manchuria, had provided them with a vast new field for economic exploitation, and the wars and rearmament programs of the militarists led to a rapid development of heavy industry and of certain other specialized war industries. The average business man remained afraid of the risks and expense of a major war, but he was not averse to cooperating with the militarists in minor colonial wars and in the profits of building an empire.
At the same time, under militarist pressure the government increasingly took over the direction and control of business and industry in preparation for an unspecified “national crisis.” Control of private capital and profits grew exceedingly stringent, and the great economic empires, like Mitsui and Mitsubishi, which