Though necessarily less active by reason of advancing age than he was a quarter of a century ago, when he succeeded in forcing the hand of the Government of the day to the extent that he extracted a promise of the establishment of a Diet in 1890, and though nominally he has retired from active political life, Count Itagaki Taisuke is still a power in the land of his birth, highly respected for his strict integrity of purpose, absolute sincerity, and wide philanthropy. As one of the leading spirits in the development of the project of Restored Imperial Rule he was particularly energetic in the years immediately preceding the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and displayed military ability of a high order in the War of the Restoration. [Illustration: COUNT ITAGAKI] Born in the province of Tosa on the 17th of April 1837, of Samurai parents, he applied himself as a youth with much ardour to martial exercises, and was proficient in all the arts that the youth of the warrior caste was, in the palmy days of the Tokugawa Administration, expected to excel in. At Kochi, the chief town of Tosa, he devoted himself to military studies, and devoured such works on strategy as were then available, with the result that when the stupendous struggle of 1868 took place between North and South he was given the command of a division, in the army of the Imperialists, and displayed invincible talent in the leadership of his men throughout the campaign under Prince Arisugawa Taruhito and Marshal Saigo Takamori. The Tosa men were conspicuous for their steadiness, and were pronounced, in respect of drill and discipline, to be in the front rank of the forces that overcame the adherents of the Shogunate and made practicable the entire abolition of that long-cherished feudal system which so greatly retarded Japan’s progress. As a reward for the eminent services rendered by him in the war, Itagaki Taisuke was made a _Sangi_ in the new Government, this being a position comparable to that of a Cabinet Minister at the present day. When, in the discussion of Korean affairs a sharp divergence of opinion was manifested in 1873-4 among the members of the Dai-jo-kwan or Governing Council, and the war party led by Saigo Takamori was outvoted, those who sided with him, one of whom was Itagaki, resigned office, and from that time forward Tosa, whither Itagaki promptly returned and vigorously applied himself to the formation of a democratic party, became known as the nursery of advanced political aspirations and the primary source whence sprang an irresistible undercurrent of opinion tending towards representative government.