Inasmuch as this proposition had arisen from the second _post-bellum_ measure of naval extension, it becomes necessary to say a few words concerning the status of the Japanese navy. The first programme as planned by the second Itō cabinet in 1895, and agreed to by the diet, contemplated an increase of Japan's naval force, in ten years, from 33 war vessels and 26 torpedo boats, aggregating the 63,000 tons' displacement of the fleet before the China war, to 67 vessels, besides 11 torpedo-boat destroyers and 115 torpedo boats, with a total displacement of 258,000 tons, at the end of 1905. Of this tonnage at the end of 1902 there was 252,180 tons, representing 72 vessels of all kinds. Formidable as these figures would seem, it had long been plain to the statesmen of the empire that deductions must be made for vessels built more than twenty years before and for others whose terms of usefulness must shortly expire one after another. Even if the present force were maintained, each of the six great naval powers of the world,--Great Britain, France, Russia, the United States, Germany, and Italy,--would have completely outrun Japan by the end of 1908; while the Japanese, after deducting vessels older than twenty years, would hardly possess more than 145,000 tons. Japan's naval ambition was animated, not so much by an inordinate elation as a civilized power as by the necessity of maintaining her position in East Asia and guaranteeing her own independence. When these matters are considered, the new programme of naval expansion, as at last set forth by the Katsura cabinet, rather surprises one with its modesty. It, in short, contemplated the construction, in the course of eleven years, of three battleships each of 15,000 tons' displacement, three armored cruisers each of 10,000 tons, and two second-class cruisers each of 5000 tons, totaling 85,000 tons' displacement, besides fifteen torpedo-boat destroyers and fifty torpedo boats. No one could have seriously opposed this programme had it not been for its financial side. The source of the estimated annual outlay of 11.5 million _yen_ which the proposed plan entailed upon the government could, according to its opinion, be found nowhere but in the retention of the increased rate of the land tax, augmented by other slight items of revenue. To the seventy or eighty per cent., however, of the members of the lower house, who had pledged their word to their constituencies to restore by all means the old rate of the tax, it was no argument to say that the landowners had been inequitably lightly taxed by the side of the urban population, nor to prove the impossibility of raising the necessary expenditure by any other safe means than the retention of the increased rate. Into their hands no sharper weapon against the government could have fallen than the one which the helpless cabinet gratuitously furnished them under the pressure of an apparent necessity. Upon this juncture, what was the