Assassination is the _ultima ratio_ of the desperation of party weakness. The act implies that the party which has sanctioned it has no one competent to cope with the individual removed, or to fill the place which it has made vacant. The position of the government upon the death of the Regent was that of helpless inactivity. The sudden removal of the foremost man of the empire was as the removal of the fly-wheel from a piece of complicated machinery. The whole empire stood aghast, expecting and fearing some great political convulsion. The whole country knew who had been the active agents in the deed; and perhaps there were at heart very few who did not feel more or less satisfaction at the blow given to the party which was responsible for, and instrumental in, bringing foreigners into the country; and a civil war or revolution would certainly have followed, had not every one felt that they were, for the first time in their history, face to face with an enemy, fear of whom concentrated all minor feelings, and consolidated them into one great national determination to rid the land of the hated foreigners. This was the one policy which the Emperor demanded of the Shiogoon, which the people looked to the government to effect, and which the lords and military classes burned to carry into execution. Were the foreigners not a mere handful of men, and were such to be allowed to beard and insult the highest personages in the land with perfect impunity? Now, when the head of the party, who was or pretended to be in favor of such a change of the laws, is struck down, if some representative of the national feelings would only arise and lead them on, they would follow to the death in such a glorious cause. But no such leader appeared. Where was Mito, the rival of the late Regent? and why did he not come forward to carry out his own policy at this juncture? The son of the late Regent was too young and inexperienced to claim his father’s office, or to assume the leadership of the party. It was the personal hatred of the two men which had been the moving spring in the daring action of the Regent, and in the underhand plotting of Mito. In all probability the feelings of hostility with which each regarded the foreigner were equally strong. Mito said you must admit foreigners, because you cannot keep them out. He thought we can admit foreigners, and, if we see fit, afterward turn them out. But Mito was disliked by the other Daimios, and his name was not sufficient to rally a strong party, while he[15] and the lately degraded Daimios were now in arrest in their own houses, in territories which had been transferred to the hands of infants. They had thus no opportunity for intriguing, having no common place of meeting out of Yedo, as by law they were prohibited from going to Miako, and could only come to Yedo as Daimios, when called there on duty by the government.