Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/225

 inconsistent with friendly intercourse and fatal to the maintenance of the Shōgun's administration. A favourite saying of Ando, who succeeded the great Tairō, Ii, was: "If the rōnin thirst so ardently for blood, let them take my life, or the Shōgun's, but let them never raise their hand against a foreigner, for they would thus endanger the national safety." It is possible that these words, profoundly wise as they were, furnished a cue to the rōnin. Whatever the Shōgun's chief minister denounced as eminently objectionable, that commended itself most to these desperate patriots. No clearer exposition of the motives animating them can be found than that furnished by documents from the hands of the men who slew the Tairō Ii. These last testaments teach that their writers did not distinguish between the peaceful coming of foreign traders under a treaty of amity and an invasion of enemies from abroad. They recalled the fact that their country's wisest statesmen, after full experience of foreign intercourse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had seen no alternative but to prohibit it completely. They were not without some knowledge of Western history. They knew that the great States of Europe constantly grew greater by swallowing smaller States, and they feared that the fate of the latter might overtake Japan. They believed that steadfast faith in the Shintō deities, supplemented by the stout arms