LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOSEPH HARDY NEESIMA

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116 SEMINARY COURSE AT ANDOVER. reforms and improvements of our policy and customs, so as to be upon an equality with them." In its diplo­IL.:ttic character the embassy was a failure. The Treaty Powers were unwilling to abandon their extra­territorial rights, and to commit the sole administra­tion of justice to a people without a civil code, to whom trial by jury and the writ of habeas corpus were unknown, and whose criminal procedure was still characterized by cruelty and contempt for personal rights. In its subsidiary quest for information on the political and social institutions of Christendom, the embassy was, however, eminently successful, and its return was signalized by a very remarkable series of reforms. Its leading members were Iwakura Tomomi, Okubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayossi, Ito Hirobumi, Terashima Munenori, and Tanaka Fujimaro. Iwakura, the chief ambassador, was a Kuge or court noble, and had been a chamberlain of the imperial household of the father of the present Mikado. On the overthrow of the shogunate he had entered the cabinet as Minister of Foreign Affairs. With Kido, Ito, and Okubo, he was active in the movement which led to the restoration of the supreme authority of the Mikado. The memora­ble address to the Emperor, signed by the powerful daimios of the southwest, in which these princes re­signed to the crown their feudal rights, was drawn up by Kido, who was the head, as Saigo was the arm, of the imperial cause in the revolution of 1868-69. On their return home these men occupied important posts in the government and took a prominent part in the reconstruction of the empire. Mori Arinori, at this time representing Japan in Washington, and the first Japanese to be appointed under the restoration to a

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