The methods of taxation were very arbitrary, and the person and the rights of property of individuals were not very highly respected at that time, the common people under the Shogunate being often subjected to hard and brutal treatment, their persons maltreated and injured and their properties confiscated on various trifling pretences. Though the way to petition was not absolutely debarred to them, it was made very irksome and perilous for plebeians to sue and obtain a hearing for their manifold complaints. On the other hand, as they were not recognised as a part of the nation to be necessarily consulted, and as the _vox populi_ was not heeded in the management of public affairs, their education was not regarded as an indispensable duty of the government. No serious endeavour had ever been made to improve the common people intellectually, nor to raise their standard of living. If a number of them showed themselves able to behave like gentle folk, as if they had been warriors by birth and, therefore, well-educated, they were rewarded as men of extraordinary merits such as could not be reasonably expected of them. The status of the political organisation of the country during the Tokugawa regime was also what ought to be called medieval, if we draw our conclusions from the materials ranged on the darker side only. The country had been divided into parcels, large and small, numbering in all a little less than three hundred, each with a territorial lord or a _daimyo_ as its quasi-independent autocratic ruler. The frontier line dividing adjacent territories belonging to different _daimyo_ used to be guarded very vigilantly on both sides, and passage, both in and out, was minutely scrutinised. For that purpose numerous barrier-gates were set up along and within the boundary. Any land bounded by such frontiers, and conferred on a _daimyo_ by the Shogunate as his hereditary possession, was by its nature a self-constituted state, the political system prevailing within which having been modelled after that of the Shogunate itself. At the same time the territory of a _daimyo_ was economically a self-providing, self-sufficient body. To become in such wise independent at least was the ideal of the _daimyo_ possessing the territory or of the territorial statesmen under him. In other words, the territory of a _daimyo_ was an entity, political and economical. In each territory certain kinds of produce from those confines had been strictly prohibited by regulation to be exported beyond the frontier, for fear that there might sometimes occur a scarcity of those commodities for the use of the inhabitants of the territory, or lest other territories should imitate the cultivation of like kinds of produce, so that the value of their own commodities might decrease thereby. In case of a famine, that is to say, of the failure of rice crops in a territory, a phenomenon which has by no means been of rare