Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/243

 ought not, indeed, to have been seriously entertained, for the samurai were not racially distinguished from the bulk of the nation: they had emerged originally from the agricultural class, and they could claim no special military aptitude except such as had been educated by training or encouraged by tradition. Yet of all the radical changes introduced during the Meiji era none was regarded with such misgivings by the Japanese themselves as the disbanding of the samurai army, soldiers by birth, by profession, and by heredity, and the substitution of an army of conscripts taken from the manufacturing, tradal, and agricultural classes who were believed to be entirely deficient in all military qualities. The Satsuma rebellion seemed to have been contrived by fate expressly to confirm or dispel these misgivings, and its result did more than can readily be described to establish the nation's faith in the new regimen.

with the events relating to the fall of feudalism, which, for the sake of lucidity, have been collected in the preceding section into a continuous narrative, the Imperial Government spared no effort to equip Japan with all the paraphernalia of Western civilisation. Under any circumstances it would have been natural that the master-minds of the era, the men who had planned and carried out the great work of the Restoration,