After an incarceration lasting five months in his native province he was transferred to the Temmacho Prison in Yedo, and its doors closed over him in July 1859. On the 27th of October following he was decapitated in obedience to the orders of the Bakufu, and thus at the early age of twenty-nine ended the career of one of Japan’s most earnest patriots. While his aim was the retention of Japan for the Japanese, and his determined antagonism to the Shogunate arose from its willingness to enter into treaties for the opening of the Empire to foreign trade, the object sought by his followers was the destruction of the Tokugawa dynasty itself, and their opposition to foreign intercourse proceeded not from antipathy to the Occidentals so much as from a paramount desire to put an end to the dual form of administration. The cry of “Expulsion of the Alien” was raised by Yoshida’s disciples in the expectation that acts inimical to the strangers would embroil the Bakufu with those Western Powers, the subjects of which were by degrees attaining a foothold in the country, and that government by the Shogunate would then become an impossibility. VI MARQUIS ITO A Statesman of transcendent ability, the Marquis Ito Hirobumi of necessity has his detractors. By the vast majority of the nation, however, his political views are deemed wholly acceptable, and in regard to the value of his services to his country there are not in Japan two opinions. He was born in September 1841, at Kumagé, in the province of Cho-shiu, otherwise Nagato, in south-west Japan. By birth a samurai, he spent his boyhood in studies suitable to his station in life, and became proficient in the military exercises which were prescribed for the retainers of the feudal barons, but from the time of Commodore Perry’s arrival in 1853 his aspirations became directed into a new channel, and his reading especially took a turn in the direction of the adaptation of foreign methods to the needs of Japan. In this he was associated with many of his fellow-clansmen whose names have become in later years household words in the country of their birth, and are almost equally well known to the people of other lands. Yamagata, Kido, Takasugi, Yamao, Inouye Kaoru, with many others who have since risen to fame, were fellow-students of the political and military systems of the Occidental nations, striving desperately to acquire information that should guide them in their project of raising their country to the level of the leading powers of the world. [Illustration: MARQUIS ITO]