Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/233

Rh own destruction, saw themselves suspected of exaggerating and even manufacturing those difficulties by the very men that had caused the whole trouble; the Shōgun's ministers, knowing that the purpose of their enemies, the exclusionists, was to embroil them with foreigners by attacks upon the persons and properties of the latter, and having adopted all possible precautions to avert such deeds of violence, found themselves credited, not with any solicitude for the safety of the Foreign Representatives' lives, but with instituting, under plea of zeal for that safety, "a system of isolation, restriction, and petty tracasserie, in order to make the residence of diplomatic agents as disagreeable and hateful as possible;" the Japanese administrators, earnestly striving to bring the nation to a sense of the necessity and advantages of foreign intercourse, saw themselves accused of having for their chief object the restriction of that intercourse, and declared to be harbouring an intention, should less violent means fail, "of bringing about a simulated popular movement in which foreign lives would be sacrificed;" the progressive politicians, whose propaganda of inter-state commerce encountered a serious obstacle in the general discontent caused by the appreciation of prices that followed the inauguration of that commerce, found it declared by foreign diplomatists that the discontent was artificial in its source, and that it had been