Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/160

 with fencers of repute wherever such might be found. When, in the fourth generation of the Tokugawa, the office of Shōgun fell to a boy of eleven, a number of these "wave-men" imagined that the time had come for a grand coup. They plotted to set Yedo on fire and to attack the castle in the confusion. Happily detection preceded the act. The leaders died by their own hands or under the sword of the executioner, and for a long era no repetition of such enterprises disturbed the public peace. The seventeenth-century rōnin are not to be regarded, however, as the outcome of a transient mood of political unrest. They represented a conviction apparently inherent in the Japanese mind, that every man possesses a natural right to assert his opinion in whatever manner he chooses, provided that he accepts the full consequences of his choice. That is the most emphatic form assumed by Japanese individualism. There is no element of license in the theory: a morally justifiable motive must always exist. But that condition satisfied, a man may demonstrate the sincerity and earnestness of his views by sacrificing his own life or that of another. The motive warrants the method—which may be called the Japanese version of the end justifies the means.

The era (–) of this fourth Tokugawa Shōgun, Iyetsuna, was remarkable for other things as well as for the lawlessness of the "wave-men." From that time the Tokugawa began to fare as