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 administration of the Emperor's Court. The parallel is completed by the fact that, just as these families became strong enough to defy the Muromachi control and were thus one of the instruments of the Ashikaga's downfall in the sixteenth century, so the Mito, the Owari, and the Kii contributed to the overthrow of the Tokugawa in the nineteenth.

The wealth of the State, as well as the power, belonged entirely to the Shōgun and the feudal chiefs. Broadly speaking, the latter were divided into three orders,—barons (daimyo), bannerets (hatamoto), and squires (kanin); and the barons were subdivided into three classes according to the extent of their fiefs, namely, provincial fiefs, castle fiefs, and district fiefs. There were other distinctions, but they need not occupy attention. No baron had a smaller revenue than £6,000, approximately, and the richest—Mayeda of Kaga—collected over half a million pounds sterling. Perhaps the clearest conception of the wealth of the feudatories may be gathered from the facts that two hundred and fifty-five of them had incomes ranging from £6,000 to £100,000 annually; fourteen had incomes of from £100,000 to £200,000, and fifteen collected sums varying from £200,000 to £600,000. The total revenues of the feudatories, as officially stated, was twelve millions sterling, approximately, so that the average in-