the emperor without regard to his blood relationship to the members of the group under him. Summing up what is stated above at length, there were two kinds of seigneurs who were immediately under the sovereignty of the Emperor; the one was the landlord, and the other was the group-chieftain. It is a matter of course that the former was at the same time the chieftain of the serfs who peopled the land of which he was the lord, while the latter was the lord _de facto_ of the land inhabited by himself and his clients, so that there was virtually very little difference between them. As regards their rights over the land and the people under their power it was equally absolute in both cases. The principal difference was that the right of the former rested essentially on his being the lord of the land, and that of the latter on his being the chieftain of the people. How did such a difference come into existence? The fact that there were many landlords who were not of the same stock as the imperial family, might be regarded as a proof that they were descendants of the chiefs who held their lands prior to the coming over of the Japanese, or, more strictly, before the immigration of the predominant stock. They acquiesced afterwards in, or were subjected to, the rule of the Japanese, but the relation between the Emperor and these landlords was of a personal nature, and the right of the latter over their own land remained unchanged. Later on many members of the imperial family were sent out to explore new lands at the expense of the Ainu, and they generally installed themselves as masters of the land which they had conquered. These new landlords assumed, as was natural, the same power as that which was possessed by the older landlords mentioned above. The power of the imperial family was thus extended into a wider sphere by the increase in the number of the landlords of the blood royal, but at the same time the power of the Emperor himself was in danger of being weakened by the overgrowth of the branches of the Imperial family.