Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/265

Rh unifying the Empire under the rule of the Kyoto Court. Prominent among these reformers on the Satsuma side were Saigo and Okubo, while on the Chōshiu side were Kido and Sanjo,—all four destined to play great parts in the drama of their country's new career. Saigo and Okubo, in common with the bulk of the Satsuma samurai, entertained, at the outset, strongly conservative ideas with regard to foreign intercourse, but such views, as has been shown, were not shared by the Satsuma chief and his principal vassals. The Satsuma leaders, in fact, tended to liberalism. Chōshiu, on the contrary, was permeated by anti-foreign prejudice. Hence anything like hearty coalition between the two clans seemed impossible, and the breach grew wider after 1863; for the bombardment of Kagoshima by a British squadron in that year having finally convinced all classes in Satsuma of the hopelessness of resisting foreign intercourse, they made no secret of their progressive principles, and were consequently regarded as unpatriotic renegades by the Chōshiu samurai. Events accentuated the difference. The Chōshiu batteries in 1863 fired on and destroyed a Satsuma steamer laden with cotton for foreign markets; the Satsuma men took a leading part in resisting Chōshiu's attempt to reenter Kyōtō in 1864. Nothing seemed less likely than a union of such hostile elements. But Chōshiu's turn to receive a convincing object lesson came in 1865, when a foreign fleet attacked