Quite contrary to _samurai_ usage, those people below them in rank held with the _daimyo_ of the territory in which they lived a relationship which was purely public in character. Socially they were treated as men beneath the _samurai_, and they themselves were content to be treated as such. As a class, however, they had no personal relations with the _daimyo_, unless through the _samurai_, to whom the usufruct of the land which they cultivated had been allotted by the _daimyo_. In other words, their duty to their territorial lord was nothing but that which they owed as a people governed to a governor who chanced to rule hereditarily over the territory, but might at any time be displaced by somebody else at the pleasure of the Shogunate. Fidelity on their part to the _daimyo_, therefore, was no personal obligation, nor the result of a reciprocal contract, but only a product of a long history, if any example of such virtue were exhibited. They had no need to follow their _daimyo_ as his _samurai_ used to do, whithersoever he might be transferred. On the contrary, all of them remained as a rule in the old territory, in which they continued for long years to pursue their business, and welcomed the newly-appointed _daimyo_. In this respect they might be said to have been much more fixed to the territory than the _samurai_. At the same time, as their relations with the _daimyo_ were not very close, their movements were not so vigilantly watched as those of the _samurai_, and during the Tokugawa period, there went on incessant goings and comings of the lower order in and out of various territories, though very insignificant in character and therefore apparently unnoticed. Summarily speaking, the boundary of the territories of the _daimyo_ was of no practical value in restricting the population within its geographical pale, in spite of the fact that all _daimyo_, without exception, exercised their right of scrutinising the ingress and egress of travellers at certain fixed barriers on the boundary line. Viewed from the standpoint of the internal migration of people of all classes, Japan was far from being an agglomeration of isolated territories. No wonder that the contemporary culture, springing up from whichever of the three possible sources, could not remain secluded within the confines of particular localities, but gradually permeated the country in every direction, and became one.