Almost immediately after the Restoration, the Government of the Mikado expressed the desire to revise the treaties concluded between it and the foreign Powers during the last years of the old regime. What it most desired was to abrogate the extra-territorial privileges granted to strangers, and to render them responsible to the native tribunals. It also hoped to re-possess itself of the right to modify the Custom-house tariff, which was very low, not with a view to protection, but in order to augment the revenues. In exchange for these concessions Japan offered to open the country to Europeans, to allow them to reside and to establish their industries anywhere outside of the five ports in which they had hitherto been confined. Joint negotiations were opened with the seventeen Powers who had signed the treaties on several occasions, but without favourable results, and the check they received in 1897 greatly irritated public opinion in Japan. The Government then decided to negotiate separately through the intermediary of its representatives in Europe. The first success was with England, by the treaty concluded in 1894; the other nations followed suit, and the new treaties were enforced on July 17th, 1899. For several years, however, a change had taken place in public opinion in Japan, and many people began to think that it might be as dangerous to completely open the country to foreigners as to grant them privileges of proprietorship. ‘They are much richer than we are,’ said they, ‘and will buy up all our lands and strip us of our resources, so that in time we shall cease to be masters in our own house.’ On the other hand, the Europeans began to make an outcry at the thought that they would be obliged to submit to Japanese jurisdiction, which, although founded on the European system, might be misapplied by the Yellow people, who were still barbarians, and who might use it to make the existence of foreigners in Japan intolerable. Both views of the case were exaggerated, and rendered the task of the various diplomatists an exceedingly difficult one. Diplomacy, however, carried the day, not without sacrificing the proposed absolute equality of rights between Japanese and foreigners.