despite the preponderant sympathy in the house with the landowning class of the country, agreed to by a majority of 161 to 134. But for its passage, the deficit of the next fiscal year would have reached beyond forty-six millions of _yen_. Let us pause a moment to examine the nature of the Japanese land tax, without an understanding of which neither the past nor the future of the parliamentary politics will be comprehended with sufficient clearness. The reader will recall how before the fall of feudalism most of the arable land in the country was held in fief, and how the tenants paid to their lords onerous rents, ranging between thirty and seventy per cent. of the product of the soil. When the imperial government assumed the control of the state in 1868, it found itself confronted with the colossal task of reorganizing the machinery of the state in nearly all of its parts, and introducing new, urgent measures, some of which were on a large scale, and all of which demanded a considerable outlay of funds. To do this they were supplied with a miserably small income, which hardly covered one-tenth of the necessary expenditures. It was essential above all to institute a sound system of taxation, whose basis, in those days of an insignificant foreign trade, could not but consist in a reorganized land tax. Nothing could, however, be done in that direction, so long as the local _daimios_ still held their fiefs, to which the authority of the new government could not penetrate. It was only when the fiefs were, in the manner already described in a previous chapter, surrendered to the state that anything toward the establishment of a secure system of taxation could be attempted. Pending the assessing of the values of the arable land, which naturally required time, the government resorted to the issuance of inconvertible notes and other measures of purely temporary and irregular nature. The land tax itself was, however, conceived and finally established in the most remarkable manner, its principle being, in the first place, a complete nationalization of land, and, then, the transferring of the ownership to the individual holders who were actually tilling it. The duty of the new owner to pay a tax to the state for his landed property was evidently conceived by the government as a natural consequence of the ownership so bountifully and so completely conferred upon him on their initiative. With the land tax securely installed, the main structure of the new system of national taxation had been finished, for the issue of this new tax at its first complete return amounted to more than two-thirds of the entire revenue of the state. It now remains to be told how the value of each piece of land was assessed and its tax determined. The assessment of value consisted, first, in taking the average of the harvest for five years, then converting it into money at the basis of the average price of rice ruling in the same period, and, finally, estimating the amount