Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/231

 which, by securing to all the clans a share of administrative authority, would prevent the undue preponderance of any one of them. It need scarcely be repeated that the military class alone entered into this account. A "national assembly" was regarded solely as an instrument for eliciting the views of the samurai. Two such assemblies actually did meet in the years immediately following the Restoration. But they were nothing more than debating clubs. No legislative power was entrusted to them, and their opinions received little official attention. After the second fiasco they were tacitly allowed to pass out of existence. Everything, indeed, goes to show that representative government might have long remained outside the range of practical politics had not its uses derived vicarious value from special complications.

Chief among those complications was the Korean question. The story of Japan's relations with Korea, though dating from very remote times and including several memorable incidents, may be epitomised here into a statement that from the sixteenth century, when the peninsula kingdom was overrun by Japanese troops under Hideyoshi's generals, its rulers made a habit of sending a present-bearing embassy to felicitate the accession of each Japanese Shōgun. But after the fall of the Tokugawa Government, the Korean Court desisted from the custom, declared its determination to have no further relations