Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/275

 as the political parties had been formed on the lines of persons, not principles, so the opposition in the Diet was directed against men, not measures. The struggle presented varying aspects at different times, but the fundamental question at issue never changed. Obstruction was the weapon of the political parties. They sought to render legislation and finance impossible for any Ministry that refused to take its mandate from the majority in the Lower House, and they imparted an air of responsibility and even patriotism to their destructive campaign by making "anti-clanism" their warcry, and industriously fostering the idea that the struggle lay between administration guided by public opinion and administration controlled by a clique of clansmen who separated the Throne from the nation. Had not the House of Peers stood stanchly by the Government throughout this contest, it is possible that the nation might have suffered severely from the rashness of the political parties.

There was something melancholy in the spectacle. The Restoration statesmen were the men that had made modern Japan; the men that had raised her, in the face of immense obstacles, from the position of an insignificant Oriental State to that of a formidable unit in the comity of nations; the men, finally, that had given to her a Constitution and representative institutions. Yet these same men were now fiercely attacked by the arms they had themselves nerved; were