Hostility to foreigners at this time, however, was a feeling common to most Japanese, even Shōgunate officials being no exception to the rule. Writers on Japan mention as one cause which served to increase this feeling the drain of gold from Japan, which began as early as the operations of the first Portuguese traders. Another—adduced by the Japanese Government itself—was the great rise in prices which followed upon the opening of Treaty ports. Sir Rutherford Alcock, in the _Capital of the Tycoon_, adds a third—the memory of the troubles connected with the Christian persecution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and of the serious alarm then entertained by the Japanese authorities at the undisguised pretensions of the Pope. The understanding regarding the Treaty question arrived at by the Regent with the Court did little to check the growth of anti-foreign feeling, for the Court continued its intrigues as before, and the Regent’s death, in the spring of 1860 at the hands of assassins instigated by the ex-Prince of Mito, provided a further opportunity. The effects of the fierce anti-foreign crusade upon which it then embarked were seen in the murder of the Secretary of the American Legation, in the successive attacks made on the British Legation, and in other violent acts by which foreigners were not the only sufferers. Yielding to the pressure of public opinion, the Government itself became almost openly hostile. Placed in this difficult position, the representatives of the Treaty Powers found both dignity and safety compromised. What, they might well ask, was to be gained by protests to the Japanese authorities in regard to acts with which the latter’s sympathy was barely concealed, of which they not infrequently gave warning themselves, but against which they were unable, or unwilling, to afford protection? Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the representatives of Great Britain, France, Germany and Holland should in 1862 have retired temporarily from the capital to Yokohama—an example not followed by the American representative; nor that the British Legation on its return, at the Japanese Government’s request, four weeks later, should have been immediately attacked in spite of a formal guarantee of protection. In respect of this attack, in the course of which two sentries were murdered, an indemnity was afterwards paid. Matters were further aggravated by the murder in September of the same year (1862) of Mr. Richardson, a British subject, on the high road near Yokohama by the bodyguard of a Satsuma noble, Shimadzu Saburō, who was on his way back to Kiōto from the Shōgun’s Court in Yedo. A formal apology for this outrage was demanded by the British, together with the payment of an indemnity. The growing power of the Court and the anti-foreign party, for the two were one, showed itself also in its behaviour to the Shōgunate after the Regent’s death.