Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/263

Rh interrupted expedition against Chōshiu. But the opportunity to carry it to a successful issue no longer existed. The Chōshiu men had found time to organise their defences, and to receive a large accession of strength from quarters permeated with dissatisfaction against the Yedo Government. Every operation undertaken by the Shōgun's adherents ended in failure, and the Chōshiu samurai found themselves in a position to assume the offensive.

While the nation was watching this display of impotence and drawing conclusions fatal to the prestige of the Yedo Government, the Shōgun died and was succeeded by Prince Keiki (1866). It has been shown that Prince Keiki was put forward by the anti-foreign conservatives as candidate for the succession to the Shōgun's office in 1857, when the complications of foreign intercourse were in their first stage of acuteness. Yet no sooner did he become Shōgun in 1866 than he remodelled the army on French lines, engaged English officers to organise a navy, sent his brother to the Paris Exposition, and altered many of the forms and ceremonies of his Court so as to bring them into accord with Occidental fashions. This contrast between the politics he represented when a candidate for office and the practice he adopted on succeeding to power nine years later, furnished an apt illustration