Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/31

 military and administrative purposes. Their incomes were, in effect, not private fortunes but revenues of principalities. The humblest of the bannerets had to equip and maintain a force consisting of twenty-three swordsmen, two spearsmen, one archer, and one musketeer, and a fief with a revenue of £60,000 must be able to put seven hundred and fifty men into the field at any moment. Statistics show that some six hundred thousand samurai families had to be supported out of the revenues of the fiefs, and that a muster of all military men between the ages of twenty and forty-five would have produced a force nearly a million strong.

When the Tokugawa originally established themselves in Yedo, they eschewed everything in the nature of pomp and display. Their official buildings were of wood with boarded roofs, and their resident edifices were thatched with straw, had no interior decoration of any kind, and were even without mats for the floor. But from the moment when the provincial barons had to make arrangements for periodical residence in the Tokugawa capital, this austere fashion underwent modification. The feudatories that had been most intimately associated with the Taikō led a new departure, partly, perhaps, because they had become honestly imbued with that great statesman's artistic views, partly because they sought to establish a contrast between their own splendour and the rude austerity