Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/168

 direct it. They observed unprecedented luxury on the part of merchants and farmers and equally conspicuous poverty among the samurai, and they imagined that the only way to mend this to them incongruous state of things was to enforce a system of strict economy, and to restrain by sumptuary laws the growing extravagance of the inferior classes.

But the sources of the change were beyond the reach of such methods. During the first one hundred and thirty years of Tokugawa rule the samurai, no longer required to lead the frugal life of camp or barracks, and occupying a position midway between the aristocracy and the people, began to live beyond their incomes. They ceased to be able to support retainers, and found difficulty in meeting the pecuniary engagements of every-day existence, so that money acquired new importance in their eyes and they gradually forfeited the respect which their traditional disinterestedness had won for them in the past. At the same time the abuses of feudalism grew more and more conspicuous as the tranquillity of the Empire deepened. A large body of hereditary soldiers, supported from generation to generation at public charges, may find an excuse for existence when war affords an opportunity for their employment, but they become an anommaly and a burden when fighting has passed out of sight and even out of memory. In the middle of the eighteenth century the samurai presented