The letter brought trouble to Sakuma’s door because it happened to fall into the hands of his political foes, who promptly denounced him to the Government as having instigated a Japanese subject to transgress the laws, and his arrest and imprisonment speedily followed. He was permitted to return to his native province, but was there confined to his own house, on pain of immediate punishment if he ventured to quit it. For nine years he endured this captivity, and then was set free, receiving thereupon invitations from the feudal lords of both Nagato and Tosa to settle in their territories and act in each case as adviser upon matters of coast defence. Nagato is the Japanese title of the province otherwise known as Cho-shiu, and Tosa is one of the four baronies of the Shikoku (_lit._: four states) island, the third largest of the group forming the Japanese empire. Sakuma’s fame as an ardent reformer had already spread to the south, in which the two chieftains named held sway, and they thus early evinced their antagonism to the Tokugawa regime, and their recognition of the purity and self-sacrificing character of those ambitions for which Sakuma had already suffered imprisonment. Both _dai-mios_, in inviting Sakuma to make his home within their borders had it in mind, beyond doubt, to protect him from the dangers that were fast accumulating above his head, and had he been willing to become the protege of either he would have been comparatively safe, for they were all-powerful within their own fiefs, and might have secured for him perfect freedom for the elaboration of his plans of reform. But for reasons with which the present age has little concern, and were they even fully comprehended might scarcely, perhaps, be appreciated, Sakuma respectfully declined the flattering offers thus made to him and clung to his home in Yedo to the last. Japan was now on the verge of experiencing a crisis in her affairs which threatened to end in one of those sanguinary internecine struggles for supremacy between rival factions to which in her long and exceedingly diversified history, not only under the Tokugawa dynasty but for centuries antecedent thereto, she had been no stranger.