of them, without training or experience, turned at once to commerce and agriculture, and in numerous instances those who had become merchants fell victims to their own want of knowledge and to the craft of others, losing everything they possessed and incurring the contempt of the mercantile classes whom they had so long counted their inferiors. The overthrow of the feudal tenure naturally affected the military organization of the nation. Hitherto soldiers to form the imperial guard had been raised in Satsuma, Chōshū, and Tosa, and the remaining force had consisted of five garrison corps (_chindai_), quartered at different places and recruited from cities and prefectures in the proportion of five men per 10,000 _koku_ of rice crop. In 1872 the military department (_hyōbushō_) was replaced by two separate departments of war and the navy, and an imperial ordinance provided that soldiers should be recruited from all parts of the empire and all classes of the people, the monopoly of military service held by the _samurai_ being thus abolished and the method existing a thousand years previously restored. At the same time it was clearly indicated that the command in chief of all the forces devolved on the sovereign. All persons of twenty years or upward were liable for conscription, and the army was divided into troops with the colors (_jōbi-hei_), the reserve (_kōbi-hei_), and the militia (_kokumin-gun_). Subsequently all of the castles in the fiefs were dismantled with the exception of fifty-five, which were handed over to the war department, and the number of the garrison corps was increased to six, their headquarters being Tōkyō, Sendai, Nagoya, Ōsaka, Hiroshima, and Kumamoto. Various new regulations relating to military matters were afterward issued from time to time, or revisions of the old effected, a colonial militia for Hokkaidō being among the new measures. Meanwhile, the naval department established naval stations, built dockyards and ships of war, and opened colleges, so that the organizations of the two branches of the military service were placed on a satisfactory footing.