which Hideyoshi attempted unsuccessfully to carry into Korea in the Sixteenth Century, led directly at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century to the formal establishment of the Shogunate, that military dictatorship being the result of the backwash of the Korean adventure, and the greatest proof of the disturbance which it had brought in Japanese society.  The persistence of this hereditary military dictatorship for more than two and a half centuries is a remarkable illustration of the fact that as in China so in Japan the theocratic conception was unworkable save in primitive times—­civilization demanding organization rather than precepts and refusing to bow its head to speechless kings.  Although the Restoration of 1868 nominally gave back to the Throne all it had been forced to leave in other hands since 1603, that transfer of power was imaginary rather than real, the new military organization which succeeded the Shogun’s government being the vital portion of the Restoration.  In other words, it was the leaders of Japan’s conscript armies who inherited the real power, a fact made amply evident by the crushing of the Satsuma Rebellion by these new corps whose organization allowed them to overthrow the proudest and most valorous of the Samurai and incidentally to proclaim the triumph of modern firearms.

Now it is important to note that as early as 1874—­that is six years after the Restoration of the Emperor Meiji—­these facts were attracting the widest notice in Japanese society, the agitation for a Constitution and a popular assembly being very vigorously pushed.  Led by the well-known and aristocratic Itagaki, Japanese Liberalism had joined battle with out-and-out Imperialism more than a quarter of a century ago; and although the question of recovering Tariff and Judicial autonomy and revising the Foreign Treaties was more urgent in those days, the foreign question was often pushed aside by the fierceness of the constitutional agitation.

It was not, however, until 1889 that a Constitution was finally granted to the Japanese—­that instrument being a gift from the Crown, and nothing more than a conditional warrant to a limited number of men to become witnesses of the processes of government but in no sense its controllers.  The very first Diet summoned in 1890 was sufficient proof of that.  A collision at once occurred over questions of finance which resulted in the resignation of the Ministry.  And ever since those days, that is for twenty-seven consecutive years, successive Diets in Japan have been fighting a forlorn fight for the power which can never be theirs save by revolution, it being only natural that Socialism should come to be looked upon by the governing class as Nihilism, whilst the mob-threat has been very acute ever since the Tokio peace riots of 1905.