It is said that the richest bourgeois of Yedo, who had amassed immense sums of money at the beginning of the nineteenth century were those who had advanced their moneys at a very high rate of interest to a great many needy _hatamoto_, who were obliged to garnishee to those merchants their allowances in rice from the Shogunate at fixed intervals, in order to steer securely through stretches of low water or through the straits of Hard-Times in their household economy. On the whole, however, we see a great difference in that the merchants of Yedo were the patronised party in their relations with the warrior-class, while those of Osaka were mostly creditors and the military men their debtors. But whatever might have been their difference in general character from the merchants of Osaka, the commercial aristocrats of Yedo, induced by their opulence to live a leisurely and very luxurious life, could not fail to become gradually patrons of the bourgeois arts and literature, merely tinged by a little more of the martial element than those of Osaka. Three cultural currents thus ran parallel to one another in the history of the modern civilisation of our country, that of the orthodox _samurai_ with its centre in Yedo, that of court-nobles and county-gentry flowing from Kyoto as its source, and lastly that of the commercial class with its stronghold in Osaka. If these three currents had remained irrelative to one another to the last; if, in other words, they had continued for long to belong specially to one of the three distinct and exclusive groups of the nation, then the historic revolution of the Meidji era would not have been effected, and Japan might be in a state but half medieval and half modern. Fortunately, class distinction in our country was not, at that time, so rigid as to hamper absolutely the amalgamation of different classes, and a certain type of culture, which had for a time been but a speciality of one particular class, soon ceased to be so, and was extended to the other classes, and the process necessarily led to the fusion of all the cultures of different types. As one of the causes which hastened such an amalgamation must be mentioned the intermarriage of people of different classes.