foreign relations and maintained the advisability of pursuing the policy of kai-koku—_i.e._ opening the country—which Iyesada had initiated. Neither side was in actual fact antagonistic to foreigners, and no sooner had the Jo-I party attained its purpose in overthrowing those who had espoused the cause of the Shogun, than it at once adopted an attitude towards aliens which was in effect a complete ratification of the policy that had been adhered to by the Government of Yedo. The Sat-cho alliance to “expel the stranger” entered into between Satsuma and Choshiu at the end of 1861, or early in 1862,—a couple of years before the present Marquis Ito and his comrade Inouye Bunda, now Count Inouye, stole away to England,—was mainly designed to embarrass the Shogunate, and was by no means so reactionary as it at first appeared to be. When Perry dropped anchor at Uraga it was the Shogun Iyeyoshi who sat on the Viceregal throne in Yedo, but he shortly afterwards died, and was buried in the cemetery attached to Zozoji temple in Shiba, where five other Shoguns of the Tokugawa line were interred, and when Perry came for the promised answer to the American President’s letter the Shogun Iyesada was in power. But soon afterwards his health failed him to the degree that he found it expedient to appoint a Regent in the person of the Go Tai-Ro (_lit._: Honoured Great Elder)—_i.e._ Prime Minister of State under the Tokugawa Government—an office which was filled by the baron Naosuke Ii Kamon-no-kami, between whom and the feudal chieftain of Mito there were great differences of opinion in regard to the wisdom of the Kai-koku policy. For reasons which were never very clearly comprehended, Nari-aki, the senior lord of Mito, was all his life bitterly opposed to the influx of foreigners, and when in 1860 the Regent was assassinated at the Sakurada Gate of Yedo castle the crime was perpetrated by men who had once been retainers of the Mito family, but had voluntarily severed their connection therewith in order that the responsibility for the murder that they were resolved to commit should not be laid at the door of their lord. They banded themselves together as Ro-nins, or “Wave-men,” casting themselves as it were on the billows of adventure, and caring nothing whither they might drift in the political currents of the hour. Other Ro-nins made a midnight attack in 1861 on the then recently-established British Legation at Takanawa, a southern suburb of Yedo, and these were afterwards proved to have belonged previously to the Mito clan. The daimio Nari-aki died in 1862, and it was felt that one source of uneasiness had been removed from the path of those who were totally averse to the suggested expulsion of the subjects of foreign powers and repudiation of the compacts which had been entered into. But the assassinated Regent had had other enemies in the political world, for his appointment had never been favourably received by the Jo-I party (in