fifteenth and last of the Shogun, resigned all the power he had, political as well as military, into the hands of the Emperor Meidji, who had just succeeded his father the Emperor Komei. This happened in November of the year 1867. A little previous to this the proposition of the Shogunate to open the port of Hyogo, now Kobe, to foreign trade was agreed to by the Emperor, a fact which proves how difficult it was to maintain the out-of-date seclusion-policy. From this it can be seen that the Shogunate of the Tokugawa fell, after the lapse of two hundred sixty four years from its beginning, not from lack of foresight on the part of their statesmen, but solely from loss of prestige. The prestige of the Shogunate was lost, simply because the system, such as it was, had become anachronistic in the face of the altered conditions of the country, which had been steadily progressing during these centuries. In other words, the Tokugawa Shogunate had been undermining itself for a long time by having courageously undertaken the honourable task which it was destined to perform in our national history, and it collapsed just in time when it had accomplished its mission. The fall of the Shogunate, therefore, must be said to have taken place very opportunely. The overthrow of the Shogunate, however, did not mean the mere downfall of the House of the Tokugawa; but it was the final collapse of the military regime, which had actually ruled Japan for nearly seven centuries, and the demolition of such a grand and elaborate historical edifice as the Shogunate could not be expected to be carried out without a catastrophe. That catastrophe came in the form of a civil war, which raged over the country for more than a year.