What is unique in our modern history is that, parallel with the growth of the democratic tendency in the nation, the imperial prestige effected a remarkable increase. This seemingly contradictory phenomenon may be explained easily by considering how our present notion of fidelity to the Emperor has evolved. The divine authority of the Emperor did not suffer any remarkable change after his personal regime ceased, though his political prestige had been eclipsed by the assumption of power by the Fujiwara nobles. Even after the establishment of the Shogunate, nobody in Japan had ever thought it possible that the Emperor could be placed in rank equal to or under a Shogun or any other sort of dictator, however virtually powerful he might have been. Through all political vicissitudes the Emperor has remained always the noblest personage in Japan, and in this sense he has been the focus toward which the heart of the whole nation turned. The relation of the Emperor to the people at large, during these periods of eclipse, was indirect. Between them intervened the Shogun and the _daimyo_ as actual immediate rulers, so that fidelity to the Emperor had been spoken of only academically, and their fidelity, in a concrete sense, had been solely centered in their immediate master, who reciprocated it by the protection he extended directly over them. Thus fidelity on the one hand and protection on the other hand had been conditioned by each other, and because the bond was naturally an essential link of the military regime, it was strengthened by its being handed down from generation to generation. In short, the fidelity of the Japanese may be said to be a product of the military regime, and owes its growth to the hereditary relation of vassalage. As all the ideals and virtues cherished among the _samurai_ class used to be considered by plebeians as worthy of imitation, if practicable in their own circles, fidelity was also understood by them in the same sense as among the military circles, that is to say, as a soldierly virtue in a subordinate toward his superior. So it grew to be more disciplinary, self-sacrificing and devotional, than in the times before the military regime. This condition of the national morals had continued to the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, with occasional relaxations, of course. But now that the Shogunate and the _daimyo_ were eliminated from the political system, the foci toward which the fidelity of the people had been turned ceased to exist, and the fidelity remained, as it were, to be a cherished virtue of the nation though without a goal. It sought for a new focus, looked up one stage higher than the Shogun, and was glad to make the Emperor the object of its fervent devotion. Soon it developed almost into a passion, because the nation became more and more conscious of the necessity of a well-centred national consolidation, and it could find nowhere else a centre more fit for it than the Emperor. His