Okubo never received the title of Viscount, but the rank was posthumously conferred for the benefit of his family. His assassination was attributed to ill feeling engendered among certain adherents of the Satsuma clan by his attitude with regard to the rebellion of 1877, as some thought he ought to have supported his clan in the war. He was a loyal and devoted servant of his Emperor, and placed his duty to his sovereign above all considerations of clan or party connections. XI COUNT GOTO SHOJIRO The late Count Goto, who died in 1892, was a trusty retainer of the Prince of Tosa, one of the four provinces into which the island of Shikoku, as its name implies, was of old divided. The chief town of Tosa is Kochi, a well-known port on the east coast, facing the Pacific. The Tosa clan was one of the first to make use of foreign-built vessels, the prince owning more than one steamer officered by Europeans in the “early seventies” when the coasting trade was in its infancy. Goto Shojiro was born in the year 1832, and in his young days was a close student of Dutch books, but the advent of the American “black ships” at Uraga in 1853 led him to turn his attention to marine affairs, and he applied himself vigorously to the acquisition of a competent knowledge of modern inventive progress, becoming convinced thereby of the necessity for a radical change in his own country’s methods if she would hold her own among the nations. It was for his acquaintance with engineering matters that he was chosen to act as Vice-Minister of Public Works when the administration was first set up in the new capital, but he had taken a prominent part in the abolition of the Shogunate from the days when the Shogun Tokugawa Keiki dwelt at the Nijo Castle in Kioto, in 1866, often going thither in company with Komatsu Tatewaki of the Satsuma clan, to discuss politics with his Highness on the Shogun’s special invitation. Goto at all times steadfastly urged the advisability of the formation of an Imperial Government upon the Shogun, and it speaks volumes for the broad-minded unselfishness of the Prince Tokugawa Keiki (as he now is) that he was prepared to listen to suggestions which necessarily involved his own renunciation of the exalted position that he then held, and even, as the sequel showed, to act upon them, though in doing so he deprived himself of rank and power at one stroke. That Goto Shojiro made good use of the opportunities thus presented to him of laying before his Highness the fruit of his own researches into the then dimly comprehended sources of Occidental strength and prosperity is evident, and for that service to his country, if for no other, he deserves to be remembered, but he laid his nation under obligations to him in a variety of ways, and was active in the popular interest to the end of his days, which were all too short for it to reap the full benefit of his matured experience and