The Shogunate was tottering to its fall when it sought in June 1865 to suppress the Choshiu rising, and signally failed to do so. Only a few months later the Shogun Iyemochi died (August 1866), and was succeeded by Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu, a scion of the Mito branch of the Tokugawa family, and who is in more modern times alluded to as the Prince Keiki. The letters of which the Japanese pronunciation would be Yoshinobu are, when given their approximate Chinese sounds, to be read as Keiki, hence the two renderings of the Shogun’s name. Tokugawa signifies the “river of abundance,” and Keiki or Yoshinobu mean “goodness and joy,” the signification of the characters remaining unaltered, of course, whichever may be the system of pronunciation adopted. Shortly after Keiki’s accession to the Shogun’s seat the trouble in Choshiu was brought to an end by the lord Mori’s submission. Into the cause of that there is no need to enter here as it will be found to have been fully discussed in the chapter on the career of Marshal Yamagata. Peace was only nominally restored, for the reason that greater events were in preparation, and the country was now on the eve of those marvellous changes which ushered in the era of Meiji,—the period of Enlightened Rule,—by which his present Majesty chose that his reign should be known to posterity. The Emperor Komei’s decease followed very quickly upon that of the Shogun Iyemochi. Keiki had been Shogun only four months when Komei Tenno died and was succeeded by his son Mutsuhito, who happily still reigns over an adoring and devoted people, distinguished among the nations of the earth for their unfaltering attachment to the imperial throne and for the intense loyalty and patriotism they display towards its wise and benevolent occupant. It happened that at the moment when the Emperor Mutsuhito came to the throne Japan was torn by conflicting political views on the subject of the advisability of re-opening the country to foreign trade and intercourse, after having been closed to foreigners down to 1854 from a date early in the Seventeenth Century. The treaties which the Shogun had entered into with the representatives of Foreign Powers, during the lifetime of the Emperor Komei, still gave anything but unalloyed satisfaction to one section, and that a very numerous and implacable one, of the body politic, and the land was a prey to the most bitter dissensions. A large proportion of the so-termed anti-foreign party was sincere in its outcry for the expulsion of foreigners only so far as it might be the means to an end. No doubt there were thousands in Japan at that time who were genuinely hostile to strangers, and honestly believed that the land would be well rid of the intruders, but it is nevertheless true that these patriots, as they unquestionably deemed themselves, were exploited by the Reformers whose main ambition it was to see the country again governed by the Ten-shi himself, and not, as had so long