occurrence in our country, the export of cereals used to be forbidden in most of the neighboring territories, even when they had a "bumper crop." Such an internal embargo testifies that not only had Japan been closed against foreigners, but within herself each territory cared only for its own welfare, adhering to a mercantilist principle, as if it stood quite secluded from the rest of the country. Very little of the cohesion necessary to an integral state could be perceived in Japan of that time. Such was the condition of Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate presented to the eyes of, and easily noticed by, the foreign observers, who visited our country at the beginning and the middle of the period. Nay, many of the foreigners who wrote about our land and people seem to have shared nearly the same views as above. In truth, however, many important factors of the Japanese history of this epoch have been omitted by them, and the idea they could form of Japan from the one-sided and scanty material at their disposal was only a very incomplete image of modern Japanese civilisation. I shall, therefore, try to give a general survey of the political and social condition of our country from the beginning of the seventeenth century down to the Revolution of the Meidji, and then shall treat in brief about the civilisation of the age. The Shogunate of the house of the Tokugawa was not an entirely new invention. It was a partial recognition of the old regime which Iyeyasu had inherited from Hideyoshi, as far as the territorial lords were concerned, who were installed or recognised anterior to the advent of Iyeyasu to power. Though a great many of the former feudatories, especially those who had been faithful to the House of the Toyotomi to the last, had been killed or deprived of their possessions after the decisive battle of Sekigahara, not a few of them survived, counting among them the most powerful of the _daimyo_, the House of Mayeta, who was the master of Kaga and two other provinces on the Sea of Japan. The lords of this kind had formerly been the equals of the Tokugawa, when the latter was standing under the protection of Hideyoshi, and it was difficult for the new Shogunate, in a country where the Emperor has ever been the paramount sovereign, to make those lords formally swear the oath of fealty to itself. The nature of the sovereignty, therefore, of the Tokugawa over the feudatories aforesaid was only that of _primus inter pares_. The _daimyo_ who stood in this relation to the Shogunate were called _tozama_.