Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/258

 to public duty as well as considerable aptitude for debate.

This was not what Itagaki and his followers wanted. Their purpose was to overthrow the clique of clansmen who, holding the reins of administrative power, monopolised the prizes of officialdom. Towards the consummation of such an aim the local assemblies helped little. Itagaki redoubled his agitation. He organised his fellow-thinkers into an association called Jiyu-to (liberals), the first political party in Japan, to whose ranks there very soon gravitated several men who had been in office and resented the loss of it; many that had never been in office and desired to be; and a still greater number who sincerely believed in the principles of political liberty, but had not yet considered the possibility of immediately adapting such principles to Japan's case.

It was in the nature of things that an association of this kind, professing such doctrines, should present a picturesque aspect to the public, and that its collisions with the authorities should invite popular sympathy. Nor were collisions infrequent. For the Government, arguing that if the nation was not ready for representative institutions, neither was it ready for full freedom of speech or of public meeting, legislated consistently with that theory, and entrusted to the police considerable powers of control over the press and the platform. The exercise of these