The long arduous labours of these historians were consummated in expounding the doctrine that the Japanese nation had something unique in its civilisation which was worthy to be guarded carefully and fostered, and that the only bond which could unite the nation spiritually was fidelity towards its common centre, the Emperor, whose family had continued to reign over the country since time immemorial. The history is often criticised as being too pragmatic, narrow, and subjective, therefore not scientific. If we consider, however, that even in those countries in the West where the study of history is boasted of as having reached a high stage of scientific investigation, most of the historians, if not the histories they have written, have been also decidedly pragmatic, so that few of them can be called perfectly objective, then we should not much blame the historians and the history of the Mito school. That the school was entirely free from any sort of superstition must also be mentioned as one of its chief merits. This may be attributed to the rationalistic influence of the doctrine of Chutse, and the fact that the history was written in orthodox Chinese shows how these historiographers were imbued with Chinese ideas. It might be said, however, to their credit that the task was first undertaken in an age in which the literary language of our country had not yet become entirely independent of Chinese, and that, notwithstanding the adoption of that language, in committing the result of their researches to writing they had never fallen into the self-deception which might come from sinicomania. Since the inception of this ever-memorable historiographical undertaking, the town of Mito had continued to be the hearth of nationalism and patriotism, and thinkers devoted to these ideas had been very glad to make their pilgrimage from all parts of Japan to the centre of the pure Japanese culture, and to converse with these historians of the noted institution. It was indeed the early groups of these historians who first stirred up the nationalistic spirit in the later seventeenth century, and their successors it was who accelerated and most strongly reinforced the national movement just before the Revolution. No school of learning in Japan had even been so powerful and effective as that of Mito in influencing and leading the spirit of the nation.