Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/198

 thenceforth ruled there as governors, while districts in the south were similarly allotted to the Taira family. In this way the foundations of the feudal system were firmly laid, and the ephemeral reforms directed against hereditary offices and perpetual tenure of land, ceased to be even nominally effective in the capital and the country alike.

This fall from the administrative and economic standards set up by the sovereigns Tenchi and Kwammu can scarcely be called retrogression, for in truth the nation had never lived up to such standards: they had been from the first incompatible with the state of its intelligence. And if, on the other side of the account, there stands to the credit of the Heian epoch much progress in the refinements of civilisation, it was a civilisation which tended rapidly to moral degeneration, and must have produced fatal consequences had it not been happily checked in the twelfth century by the evolution of a robust though comparatively rude militarism.

It is often said of the Japanese that they are conspicuously indifferent to religion. If by religion is meant belief in the supernatural, and in the constant interference of supernatural beings in the affairs of every-day life, then such a saying cannot be reconciled with the story of the Heian epoch. Perhaps it should be explained here that the term "Heian epoch" is used chronologically in the sense of the interval between the