In preceding pages some account has been given of the steps by which a Far Eastern nation has risen to its present position of a Great Power. The period occupied by this transformation is less than half a century. For during the first two decades that followed the reopening of Japan to foreign intercourse reactionary influences supported by anti-foreign feeling were, as we have seen, in the ascendant; and it was not till after the Restoration that the work of remoulding all branches of administration commenced. While giving full credit to the Japanese people for the possession of the qualities that made this great change possible, the genius of the statesmen by whom they were guided should not be overlooked. Although the new direction given to national policy, the consummation of which is seen to-day, did not take place until after the Restoration, the services rendered by some of the statesmen whose names are associated with it date from before that time. The Restoration was not the work of a day, the effect of a sudden impulse. Weak as the Shōgun’s Government was, it was too firmly rooted by the mere length of its duration, by the weight of time and usage, to be easily overthrown. Before this could be done something in the nature of a united movement, a combination of forces, was essential. And in the feudal conditions then prevailing it was just this point which presented the greatest difficulty. The military strength, as after events showed, was there, but clan jealousies stood in the way of united effort. The first attempt at rebellion made by the Chōshiū clan failed, it will be remembered, for this reason, the Satsuma clan siding with the Yedo Government. Only when these two clans were persuaded to work together, and were joined by two others, as well as by disaffected members of the military class who flocked to the Imperialist standard from all parts of the country, did it become possible to organize insurrection on a scale that endangered the continuance of Tokugawa rule. It was in the formation of this alliance that the men who subsequently filled the chief offices under the new Government first came into prominence. They form, as it were, a group by themselves as the pioneers of the Imperialist movement. It was another and later set of men who took up the work thus begun, and accomplished the task of modernizing Japan.