Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/215

 old lines, the feudal chiefs must be deprived of those powers. The necessity was plain, but how could the feudatories be constrained to recognise it? No strength existed capable of coercing them. Each of the great political changes in Japan had hitherto been preceded by a war that culminated in the elevation of some clan to a position from which it could dictate terms to all the rest. There had been no corresponding sequence of events in the present case. No clan had asserted its right to replace the Tokugawa, nor would any such assertion have been tolerated by the other clans. The active authors of the revolution were a small band of samurai mainly without prestige or territorial influence, and though they might have had recourse to an Imperial mandate, it must have been evident to them that the issue of a mandate stripping the feudatories of their autocratic privileges when the means of enforcing it were obviously absent, would have been a reckless experiment. Thus, in a word, the leaders of the revolution found that their programme of national unification must be prosecuted by persuasion, not by compulsion. The exit they contrived from this dilemma is one of the most striking incidents of the revolutionary drama. They induced the feudal chiefs of Satsuma, Chōshiu, Tosa, and Hizen, now the four most powerful clans in the empire, to publicly surrender their fiefs to the sovereign, accompanying the surrender with a prayer for reorganisation under a uniform sys-