Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/223

 Tairō's escort was fixed by a rule which a man in such a high position must respect.

This happened on the 3rd of March, 1860. It proved to be the first of a series of similar acts. Occasionally foreigners were the victims, but generally Japanese leaders of progress suffered. There is no difficulty in understanding why the samurai had recourse to his sword under the circumstances of the time. The incidents of foreign intercourse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bequeathed to subsequent generations a rooted belief in the necessity of national isolation. They perceived no other way of preserving the country's integrity. Every Japanese was born with that conviction. He would have seemed to himself a traitor had he acquiesced in the signing of treaties of amity and commerce, and, above all, in the readmission of Christians to contact with the people. By the light of modern philosophy such conservatism looks irrational and even inhuman. But the Japanese regarded it by the light of experience and hereditary conviction. They had no innate prejudice against foreign intercourse; that is plain from the story related in a previous chapter. Originally they received the alien hospitably and accepted the products of his civilisation with intelligent appreciation. But he had shown himself, as they firmly believed, an aggressive enemy, whose tradal methods impoverished their country, and whose religion served as a cloak for sinister designs against the