Prince Sanjo Sanetomi Dai-jo-dai-jin: a Court noble. Prince Iwakura Tomomi Sa-dai-jin: a Court noble. Prince Shimadzu Saburo U-dai-jin. Of Satsuma. Saigo Takamori Of Satsuma. Okubo Toshimichi Of Satsuma. Kido Takakoto Of Choshiu. Inouye Bunda Of Choshiu. Ito Hirobumi Of Choshiu. Okuma Shigenobu Of Hizen. Itagaki Taisuke Of Tosa. The Ministry was in reality constituted to give equal representation to the four leading clans, as far as practicable, though the Choshiu and Satsuma influence actually predominated. Acting under authority of his Majesty the members of the Council here mentioned had in the preceding January, on the occasion of the _coup d’état_, established a provisional government, and had called upon the Shogun to surrender his heritage and to submit himself entirely to the will of his imperial master. For some months past there had been frequent conferences at the Nijo Castle in Kioto between the Shogun and Goto Shojiro (late Count Goto), who, with Komatsu of the Satsuma clan, persistently urged upon the Shogun the advisability of establishing an Imperial Government, with the effect that his Highness had been on the point of yielding to their arguments. Goto was the trusted representative of the Tosa clan, and had brought a letter from his feudal lord addressed to the Shogun, in October 1867, recommending his Highness to resign his position of Shogun, for patriotic reasons. There is excellent ground for the belief widely entertained in Japan, and which it is palpable his Majesty shares, that the Shogun, had he been wholly free to follow the dictates of his own heart, would have relinquished his office there and then, but a new complication arose through his followers coming to blows with the Satsuma retainers, thus compelling him either to repudiate them or to accept a position of absolute hostility to the new government of which the Satsuma chieftain was a leading member. It was with that extreme clemency which has throughout characterised the rule of the present monarch that in after years his Majesty spontaneously recognised that the Shogun had no real intention of being hostile to himself, and that it was mainly the acts of the adherents of the Tokugawa family which drove the Shogun into seeming antagonism to the party of reform. As already explained, the Emperor has recently conferred on the former Shogun a title by which his once lofty position in pre-Restoration days is fittingly acknowledged.