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Rh been regarded as the leader of the anti-foreign policy, but its most vehement advocates now began to be classed as rebels. Shortly afterwards, the three Powers whose merchantmen had been fired on by the Shimo-no-seki batteries, together with England, sent a joint squadron which demolished Chōshiu's forts, destroyed his ships, and without any apparent effort scattered his fighting men. This "Shimo-no-seki expedition," the theme of endless discussion in later times, had for direct result a national conviction that to resist foreigners by force was quite hopeless; and for indirect, an universal inference that the Shogunate instead of wielding the power of the country, constituted a fatal obstacle to national unity. Of all the factors that operated to draw Japan from her seclusion and to overthrow feudalism, the most powerful were the shedding of Richardson's blood at Namamugi on the Tokaidō, and the resulting "Kagoshima expedition," the shelling of foreign vessels by Chōshiu's forts at Shimo-no-seki, and the abortive attempt of the Chōshiu samurai to recover their influence in Kyōtō, by force. The year 1863 saw the "barbarian expelling" agitation deprived of the Emperor's sanction; the two principal clans, Satsuma and Chōshiu, convinced of their country's impotence to defy the Occident; the nation almost fully roused to a sense of the disintegrating and weakening effects