Throughout the preceding period of eight years the party headed by Itagaki Taisuke had never wavered in its resolute advocacy of the popular cause, though its members were often the objects of violent opposition from reactionary zealots, whose antagonism in the case of Itagaki himself took the form of a desperate assault, perpetrated by a youth whose imagination had become fired with a mistaken notion of serving his country, and who at Gifu stabbed, almost to death, the Jiyuto leader who at the time was engaged in making his first tour of the provinces after the establishment of the party on a definite basis. Fortunately the intending assassin’s aim was disturbed, for he failed to strike in a vital spot, and after a time Itagaki recovered, but he was perilously near sharing the fate of so many of his fellow-countrymen who have at various times suffered for their prominence in national politics. As has often been the result of political crimes, too, the foul deed had precisely the opposite effect to that which its perpetrator doubtless intended, for the exclamation of Itagaki as he fell to the ground,—“I may die, but freedom never!”—rang through the land, and did more to knit together the bonds of Liberalism than even floods of oratory could possibly have achieved. The following year Itagaki journeyed in company with his life-long friend and fellow-clansman, Goto Shojiro, to America and Europe, and his subsequent career was inseparably connected with the spread of Liberal ideas among his countrymen, and of preparation for the exercise of those rights and privileges guaranteed to them by the Constitution. Eventually the control of the _Jiyuto_ passed in great measure to Count Ito, and the party was dissolved, to be resuscitated on a new footing in connection with the Constitutionalists. But this did not occur until various attempts had been made in the direction of Government by party, a system which, from one cause or another, seems in Japan to be doomed to failure. Itagaki was Home Minister in the Third Ito Cabinet, which fell in August 1896, and when in June 1898 Marquis Ito went out of office, he recommended that a trial should be given to party Government, and that the formation of a Cabinet should be entrusted to Counts Itagaki and Okuma. The experiment was in no sense to be regarded as satisfactory, and the rivalries that had formerly existed, and had merely been temporarily suppressed, were revived in an aggravated form. In less than six months the internal disagreements found vent in an open quarrel, and the idea of establishing Government on a party basis was abandoned if not for ever at least for an indefinite period. There was a brief repetition of the experiment in 1900-1, extending over seven months in all, when Marquis Ito headed his fifth Cabinet, but the result was no better, and save for that short interval the administration has been for the past seven years avowedly conducted on non-party lines.