Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/214

 Imperial authority had never co-existed with military feudalism, and they also discerned that, since the beginnings of trustworthy history, the only period of Practical Imperial Sovereignty had been the interval from the middle of the seventh century to the commencement of the eighth, when the great Taikwa and Taihō reforms were effected; when rulers of such eminence as Kōtoku, Tenchi, Temmu, and Mommu occupied the Throne, and when the Fujiwara usurpations had not commenced. Evidently suggestions for procedure must be taken from that epoch, and the most obvious of them was that a homogeneous and universally operative system of law should be substituted for the locally operative and somewhat heterogeneous systems of the various fiefs, and that the power of imposing taxes must be limited to the Emperor's exercise. Such measures signified the withdrawal of legislative and financial autonomy from the feudatories. It was a radical change. Each feudal chief had hitherto enjoyed the right of collecting the revenues of his fief and applying them to whatever purposes he desired, on the sole condition of maintaining a certain minimum force of soldiers for State service. He had also enjoyed the right of enacting and enforcing whatever laws he pleased, on the sole condition that disorder must be prevented in the territory over which he ruled. He had, in fact, been a local autocrat. Now, however, if the era of Imperial sovereignty was to be restored on the