Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/205

 intercourse with foreigners, and they showed high moral courage in championing such views in spite of hearing themselves fiercely denounced as renegades and national enemies. The second party, though a unit as to the advisability of setting narrow limits to foreign intercourse, entertained divergent views on the subject of the procedure to be followed. One of its sections held that as an object lesson must be provided to teach the nation its own weakness compared with the overwhelming strength of Europe and America, and as, at the same time, even a war in which Japan suffered defeat would doubtless have the effect of modifying the arbitrariness of foreigners, the best plan was to fight at once. The other section advised temporary compliance with foreign demands, in order to gain time for developing force to drive out the alien altogether. Alike anti-foreign in their ultimate purpose, these two sections nevertheless became mutually distrustful and, in the end, implacably hostile. The third party did not reason at all, but simply declaimed against conceding anything whatever to aliens.

All this sounds very bigoted and uncivilised, but when the circumstances under which foreign intercourse came to an end in the seventeenth century are recalled, and when it is remembered that during nearly two hundred and fifty years the people had harboured a firm conviction that to admit foreigners was to forfeit national inde-