OUTLINE OF TOPICS: Local government under feudalism; periods of modern local self-government; gradual development therein; prefectural assemblies; candidates and electors; standing committee; sessions; business; speaking; petitions; how bills become laws; powers of prefectural assemblies, theoretical and practical; residents and citizens of cities, towns, and villages; rights and duties of citizens; administration in city, town, and village; city council; town and village officials; city assembly; assemblymen; powers of city assembly; town or village assembly; special provisions for towns and villages; administration of territories; pacification of Formosa; colonial government; policy in Formosa; political progress in Japan.—Bibliography. We have already noted incidentally in preceding chapters some of the steps in the development of local self-government in Japan; and now we must treat that subject more particularly. First it is well to observe in passing that the steps from feudalism to local self-government were not so difficult as might be imagined; for under the feudal system local government by clans had prevailed.[98] And yet when feudalism was abolished, the reconstruction of local government was entered upon slowly and cautiously in order to minimize jealousies and other obstacles. Wigmore, in his articles[99] on this subject, divides the period from 1867 to 1889 into two parts (1867-1878 and 1878-1889), and explains as follows: “The former was occupied with testing the capacity of the people for self-government; the latter with extending to them a larger and larger measure of power, and in advancing towards a proper degree of decentralization.” As he wrote in 1890, he was just at the beginning of the third period, what he himself calls “a new period,” during which local self-government, under the new constitutional _régime_, was to be still further expanded in the line of popular privileges.