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The general character of the Tokugawa rule can be to some degree inferred from the foregoing facts. It was in no sense a reign of terror that compelled peace and encouraged industry for two hundred and fifty years. Though the national civilization was restrained, pruned, clipped in a thousand ways, it was at the same time cultivated, refined, and strengthened.

Anyone whose name was not enrolled on one of the above lists fell under suspicion of embracing the foreign faith. Referring to the above laws the Tokugawa Jidaishi says: "The above laws and regulations were the Constitution of the Tokugawa Bakufu. By the aid of their provisions the influence of Yedo was extended to every part of the nation from the Imperial Court to the world of religion.

Historians differ as to the exact date of the establishment of the Yedo Bakufu, but the best authorities are agreed that the event should be reckoned from the battle of Sekigahara, since then, for the first time, the administrative power came into the hand of the Tokugawa baron, he having previously been simply the head of a board instituted by the Taiko.

It is easy to see that an English factory in Yedo and English ships at Uraga would have strengthened the Tokugawa ruler's hand instead of supplying engines of war to his political foes; and it must further be noted that the question of locality had another injurious outcome.

It might have been expected that the Tokugawa shoguns would at least have endeavoured to soften this administrative effacement by pecuniary generosity; but so little of that quality did they display that the Emperor and the ex-Emperor were perpetually in a state of financial embarrassment.

The Tokugawa period, covering the 270 years during which the Government of the Tycoon was installed in Yeddo, was one during which literature made great progress in Japan.

Chief among these were Their Imperial Highnesses Princes Tsai-tao and Tsai-Hsun of China; and His Imperial Highness Prince Higashi Fushimi, and Prince Tokugawa, President of the House of Peers of Japan. The Secretary of War has recently visited Japan and China in connection with his tour to the Philippines, and a large delegation of American business men are at present traveling in China.

He was universally recognized as the greatest strategist of his time, and if Nobunaga ventured to move westward, the Kai baron would probably seize the occasion to lay hands upon Owari. It is true that the alliance with Tokugawa Ieyasu constituted some protection. But Ieyasu was no match for Shingen in the field.

Before, 1867, Japan was a feudal federation of clans, in which the Central Government was in the hands of the Shogun, who was the head of his own clan, but had by no means undisputed sway over the more powerful of the other clans. There had been various dynasties of Shoguns at various times, but since the seventeenth century the Shogunate had been in the Tokugawa clan.

The third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, extended the restriction by ordering that even families having estates of only three thousand koku should not intermarry without Yedo's previous consent. "Hence it is not permissible to lead about a large force of soldiers. For daimyo whose revenues range from 1,000,000 koko down to 200,000 koku, the number of twenty horsemen is not to be exceeded.