rice in any sort of coin then in use, to make a standard of value, not of the actual amount of rice but of its unceasingly vacillating price, could not but cause a great deal of inconvenience and confusion. We can easily see from the above that the quantity of rice was by far the surer means of bargaining than the money, which was not only indeterminate in value but insufficient to boot. Hideyoshi, therefore, put a stop to the use of the method of indicating the income of a territorial lord by its valuation in money, and decreed that henceforth only the yearly estimated yield of rice, counted by the _koku_ as a unit, should be adopted as the means of denoting the revenue of a territory, a _koku_ roughly corresponding to five bushels in English measure. The land-survey, which he undertook on a grand scale throughout the whole empire, had as its main purpose to measure the area of land classed as rice-fields in the territories of the _daimyo_, according to the units newly decreed, and to make the estimate of the amount of rice said to be produced commensurate as nearly as possible with the average crop realisable. Withal, the inequality of the standard of estimate in different localities was rectified by this assessment of Hideyoshi's. This method of estimating the income of a _daimyo_ had come into general use since the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate. As there was then no system in our country of gradating the _daimyo_ by titles, such as dukes, counts, and so forth, the estimated annual yield of rice in _koku_ was used as the sole means of determining the rank of the lords of the various territories in the long queue of the Tokugawa _daimyo_, with the exception of a very few who had been placed in a comparatively high rank on account of their specially noble lineage or the unique position of their families in the national history, though most of the nobles belonging to the latter class were classed as an intervening group. The minimum number of _koku_ assigned to a _daimyo_ was ten thousand. As regards the maximum number of _koku_, there was no legal limit. One who stood, however, highest in order was the above-mentioned House of Mayeta, the lord of Kaga etc., whose domain was assessed at more than a million _koku_. About three hundred _daimyo_, who were ranged between the two extremes, were divided into three orders. All those worth more than two hundred thousand _koku_ formed a class of the _daimyo_ major, and those worth less than one hundred thousand were comprised in a group of the _daimyo_ minor, while the rest, that is to say, those between one and two hundred thousand formed the middle corps.