They would rather have preferred the single use of wood-blocks to using them together with types. Lastly, as regards those literary works by Japanese authors which Suminokura had fondly put into print, that is to say, in cases where the editor's chief care was the reproduction in facsimile of the manuscript originally executed in fine calligraphic style, movable types entirely failed to serve the purpose. All these disadvantages conspired indeed to frustrate the development of the printing in type, so that the new method was set aside soon after its introduction until the end of the Shogunate. It is certain, however, that the introduction of the use of types in printing, though to a very limited extent, contributed none the less to the general progress of civilisation in Japan, in multiplying books and in stimulating the thirst for knowledge on the part of the general public. There is no doubt whatever that, in the number of books published in Japan, the beginning of the seventeenth century far surpassed the end of the sixteenth. Bookstores, where books were sold, bought, edited, and published, were now to be found in Kyoto and Yedo, and their business became lucrative enough to be continued as an independent calling. Here the question must naturally arise, how were those multiplied books distributed? There were, besides the priests, especially those belonging to the Zen sect, not a few professional literati, who pursued learning as their chief business. Secretaries in the chancellories of the Shogun and of various _daimyo_ had been generally recruited from that class. Their number, however, had remained comparatively insignificant for a long time during the earlier part of the Shogunate, and they had been classified rather into an exclusive society, which included physicians and Buddhist priests. They had been treated as servants engaged in reading and writing, and not respected as advisers nor revered as leaders of the spirit of the age. However noble might be the profession in which they were engaged, still they were mere professional men, considered good to serve and not apt to lead. The increase in number of such men of letters, it is true, was the cause and the effect of the rise of the cultural level of the country, for it clearly denoted that Japan had begun to appreciate learning more highly than before and hence to demand more of these learned men. But that increase must have naturally stopped short, unless the learning which they taught was imbibed by the people at large and made itself a necessary ingredient of the national life, that is to say, unless the general public had gained thereby more of enlightenment.