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The shogunate itself was reduced to the humiliation of paying tribute to China. Agriculture and industry at last ceased to exist outside of the domains of certain powerful lords. Provinces became waste; and famine, earthquake, and pestilence added their horror to the misery of ceaseless war.
But the new literary party desired what would have been equivalent to the destruction of a thousand years' experience. Happily the clansmen who had broken down the Shogunate saw both past and future in another light. They understood that the national existence was in peril, and that resistance to foreign pressure would be hopeless.
There is every reason to believe that within the territories of the Shogunate proper, comprising the greater part of the Empire, the administration of ordinary criminal law was humane, and that the infliction of punishment was made, in the case of the common people, to depend largely upon circumstances.
The scholarship which led the patriots against the usurper in political life led them also against all foreign innovations such as Buddhism and Confucianism, which they scorned as modern and anti-imperial. The Shinto cultus thus received a powerful revival. With the overthrow of the Shogunate in 1868 Confucianism naturally went with it, and for a time Shinto was the state religion.
Thus was the Shogunate overthrown and the Restoration effected. The civil war which soon followed need not detain us, for the war itself had no great consequence as regards the constitutional development of the country. Let us now consider the form of the new government. It is essentially that which prevailed in Japan before the development of feudalism.
Ieshige's son, Ieharu, was a very gifted youth, and Yoshimune reckoned on himself retaining the direction of affairs for some years, so that Ieshige's functions would be merely nominal until Ieharu became old enough to succeed to the shogunate.
The slow weakening of the Tokugawa Shogunate was due to causes not unlike those which had brought about the decline of previous regencies: the race degenerated during that long period of peace which its rule had inaugurated; the strong builders were succeeded by feebler and feebler men.
During the days of Yoshimasa's shogunate such profits were realized that overtrading took place, and there resulted a temporary cessation. Fifty years later, when Yoshiharu ruled at Muromachi , a Buddhist priest, Zuisa, sent by the shogun to China, and an envoy, Sosetsu, despatched by the Ouchi family, came into collision at Ningpo.
The Ashikaga shogunate thus averted the supreme peril; but the period of this military domination, which endured until 1573, was destined to remain the darkest in Japanese history. The Ashikaga gave the country fifteen rulers, several of whom were men of great ability: they tried to encourage industry; they cultivated literature and the arts; but they could not give peace.
Whatever the political views of this nobleman may have been when he was put forward by the conservatives, in 1857, as a candidate for succession to the shogunate, he no sooner attained that dignity, in 1866, than he became an ardent advocate of progress.
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