Before many years had elapsed he made himself a real, and not a nominal, power. The full measure of his personal weight will perhaps never be known. What we do know is that he was a most generous monarch, an indefatigable worker, and that he had the art of surrounding himself with the best and wisest advisers. Had he been opposed to a forward policy the prestige which attached to the Son of Heaven would have enabled him to stay the hands of the clock; his power of obstruction would have been almost unlimited. As a matter of fact his action was always in favour of progress, and in nothing did he show this more conspicuously than in the attitude which, from the first, he took up towards foreigners. Doubtless, in the earlier days he, like his ministers, had to be careful not to run too violently against tradition and prejudice. In order to understand the policy of the new government, in regard to the native Christians, it is essential that these very real difficulties which they had to encounter should be understood. In dealing with them, Daté and Higashi Kuzé evidently knew that they had to conciliate a number of their more retrograde peers who might easily wreck the ship. Their hand was not an easy one to play; they held but one trump card—national ambition, which could not but be frustrated by disregarding the public opinion of the world, and even that card they must persuade others to take at trump value; a little too great precipitancy, a little lack of caution, and they might raise a storm of fanaticism which it would be hard to quell and which might ruin their game. In our discussions I had to minimize dangers which I knew to be no sham, and to lay stress upon advantages of which the government were probably as well aware as I was.