Yedo (4th July, 1868), then in Aizu (6th November, 1868), and lastly at Hakodate (27th June, 1869), where some of them had endeavoured to set up an independent republic.
The government of the country was reorganised during 1867-8, nominally on the basis of a pure absolutism, with the Mikado as sole wielder of all authority both legislative and executive. Thus the literary party had triumphed. All their dreams were realised. They were henceforth to have Japan for the Japanese. The Shōgunate, which had admitted the hated barbarians, was no more. Even their hope of supplanting Buddhism by the national religion, Shintō, was in great measure accomplished. They believed that not only European innovations, but everything—even Japanese—that was newer than A.D. 500, would be forever swept away. Things were to go back to what they had been in the primitive ages, when Japan was really "the land of the gods."
From this dream they were soon roughly wakened. The shrewd warriors of Satsuma and Chōshū, who had humoured the ignorance of the Court and the fads of the scholars only as long as their common enemy, the Shōgunate, remained in existence, now turned round, and declared in favour, not merely of foreign intercourse, but of the Europeanisation of their own country. History has never witnessed a more sudden volte-face. History has never witnessed a wiser one. We foreigners, being mere lookers-on, may no doubt sometimes regret the substitution of commonplace European ways for the glitter, the glamour of picturesque Orientalism. But can it be doubtful which of the two civilisations is the higher, both materially and intellectually? And does not the whole experience of the last three hundred years go to prove that no Oriental state which retains distinctively Oriental institutions can hope to keep its territory free from Western aggression? What of India? What even of China? And what was Commodore Perry's visit but a threat to the effect that if Japan chose to remain Oriental, she should not be allowed to remain her own mistress? From the moment when the intelligent Samurai of the leading Daimiates realised that the
