LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOSEPH HARDY NEESIMA

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182 MISSIONARY WORK IN JAPAN. ties. This feeling was most intense among the great clans of the southwest, and especially in the province of Satsuma, whose lord was the hereditary foe of the Tokugawas and whose samurai were renowned for their independence and military spirit. It is proba­ble that the desire of the disaffected daimio of the southwest either to reduce the Shogun to their own level as vassals of the Mikado, or to perpetuate the shogunate in the person of one of their own number, would have led to some political change independent of all foreign intervention. However this may be, the assumption of treaty re­lations by the Shogun in 1858 with foreign powers, relations repudiated by the Mikado and opposed to the traditional policy of national seclusion, intensified the prevailing discontent and brought matters to a cns1s. It is a notable fact that while the avowed pur­pose of the revolution was the overthrow of the sho­gunate and the restoration of the Mikado to supreme authority, in order that the country, thus presenting a united front to the foreign barbarians, might expel them from its borders, no sooner was the revolution effected than its leaders began to take steps towards the adoption of western civilization and the entrance of Japan into the comity of nations. These leaders had utilized the feeling of hatred against foreigners to destroy the shogunate and establish a centralized government, and while the intent of a majority of their supporters had been the expulsion of foreigners and a return to the old days of national isolation, the real directors of the movement were ready to re­construct the national policy on the basis of European civilization. They had been convinced by the bom­bardments of Kagoshima and Shimonoseki of the futil-

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