The tranquillity restored to the country by the powerful dictatorship of Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu, and the multiplication of books, Japanese as well as Chinese, reprinted in blocks or in type, remarkably enlarged the reading circle among the people. The liberal education of warriors had been earnestly encouraged by the Shogunate, mainly for the purpose of creating intelligent and law-abiding gentlemen out of rough and adventurous fighters. A great many of the _daimyo_ followed the example of the Shogunate by founding one or more schools in their own territories for the education of their own _samurai_, and in these schools moral and political lessons were given, besides training in military arts. The _samurai_ were taught to read and understand Chinese classics, with the purely pragmatic purpose of enabling them to follow the inexhaustible precepts preached by the Chinese philosophers of various ages, and at the same time to qualify them to govern the people according to the political theories of Confucius, when they were put in some responsible positions in the territorial government of their lord. The text-books used in this curriculum of education had been, of course, Chinese literature of the sort which might be called political miscellanies, that is to say, those works pertaining to morals, politics, and history. This trio was to Chinese philosophers only the three different forms of the manifestation of one and the same principle, for to them politics was an enlarged application of that very principle, which when applied to personal matters made private morals, and history was only another name for the politics of the past, as many European historians still also believe. Their Japanese pupils, however, took up any one of the trio they fancied, and interlaced it with the national tradition, each according to his own taste. The metaphysical element of the Chinese moral philosophy of the Sung dynasty, the time in which Chinese philosophy reached its high flourishing scholastic stage, was thus mingled with Shintoism.