The Emperor remained for some time at his Kioto palace before returning to Tokio, and it was known at the time that this outbreak of hostilities in a part of his dominions occasioned his Majesty the most profound sorrow, the more so that Saigo Takamori had led his own forces to victory ten years before, when the imperialists had been plunged into warfare with the adherents of the Shogun. That Marshal Saigo should have been so ill advised as to head an insurrection was to the monarch whom he had in former years served so faithfully a source of the most poignant grief, and the sad end of the arch-rebel, in battle on the crest of Shiroyama, in the town of Kagoshima, made a deep impression on all in Japan. The Emperor’s attribute of magnanimity was displayed only a few years ago in the grant of a peerage to the son of the famous Satsuma leader, and the imperial approval of the erection of a monument to his memory in the public park of Uyeno, in Tokio. The record of Saigo’s rebellion has been effaced, and only his splendid services to the State in the years prior to 1877 are kept in his sovereign’s remembrance. The period which followed the war in Satsuma was one of uninterrupted industry and persevering endeavour on the part of all the Ten-shi’s subjects to make up for the time which had been lost by the civil war. Immense interest was taken in the advancement of education and the spread of commercial enterprise, the shipping and manufacturing trades being diligently fostered by wise enactments that were often the outcome of the ruler’s own initiative. There can be no doubt that at this period were laid the foundations of that unexampled industrial prosperity which has distinguished the latter portion, down to the present time, of the Meiji era, and which, resting as it does on the most secure basis—one which even a war with a great European power has been powerless to disturb—bids fair to last for ages to come.