Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/224

 Empire's independence. It was the duty of every patriot to avert the recurrence of the old peril, against which the country's greatest statesmen and captains, the Taikō, Iyeyasu and Iyemitsu, had warned their own and succeeding generations. Whatever credit these illustrious men possessed in the mind of the nation, whatever reverence their memory commanded, was inseparably associated with the policy of seclusion which they had adopted in the apparent interests of their country and in despite of their own inclinations. The impartial historian has no choice but to admit that had the Japanese tamely suffered the resumption of foreign intercourse in the nineteenth century, they would have done violence to convictions which no patriot may ignore, and shown themselves lacking in one of the essential ingredients of national spirit. When foreigners were cut down under circumstances that left them no chance of resistance, their friends and fellow countrymen naturally denounced such acts as craven and savage. But it is necessary to remember that the perpetrators were men who had sacrificed their own worldly prospects and were ready to sacrifice their lives also in the cause they represented; that they believed themselves entitled to exercise all the license permitted to a soldier in war; and that their object, in general, was not to destroy individual foreigners so much as to create a situation