Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/199

 ity when the news went abroad that foreigners had come to establish, by force if necessary, an intercourse probably fatal to the country's independence. A logical accompaniment of this mood was the conviction that since the nation, as a whole, was threatened, the nation, as a whole, must resist; and by the light of that conviction the inter-fief jealousies and the divided rule of the Emperor and the Shōgun represented obvious sources of weakness. Everything, therefore, pointed to the sovereign as the national rallying point, and since His Majesty's first act, on learning of the arrival of foreign ships, had been to pray for heaven's guardianship of the sacred land, and for the destruction of the intruders, the nation found itself furnished with a rallying cry which soon reverberated from end to end of the country, Son nō jō-i (Revere the sovereign, expel the alien).

This condition of public thought naturally required some time for development, and as the sequence of events must be closely followed just at this stage, it will be wise to revert to their chronological order.

The Americans did not insist on the immediate conclusion of a treaty. They agreed to wait a year. The Japanese, on their side, thought that the postponement would probably be permanent. So many rumours of the advent of foreigners had proved delusive in the past that the Americans' announcement of an intention to