Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/51

 tions brought him into intimate relations with the people, and for whatever oppression they suffered he was usually responsible. Nothing that concerned farmers lay outside the Deputy's purview. Land surveys, questions of irrigation, repairs of embankments, assessment of taxable values of land, estimate of yield for fiscal purposes, supervision of agricultural methods, enforcement of precautions against famine,—all these things fell within his province, as did also the judging of civil and criminal cases. It is of the Deputy and the Magistrate that the student of Japanese history constantly hears in Tokugawa times. They were the best trained and the most competent officials of the era, and to them the farmer, the mechanic, the merchant, and the unclassed "outcast" looked as the supreme authority. Not infrequently the Deputy became an object of popular execration, but, on the whole, he discharged his functions in obedience to the precept that the prosperity of the ruled should excite the satisfaction rather than the cupidity of the ruler, and that to destroy the farmer's tax-paying capacity by imposing upon him excessive burdens was to mistake the prime purpose of good administration.

Other officials discharging important duties chiefly of an investigatory nature but sometimes of a judicial, were the "Censors" (Metsuke), of whom the chiefs (O-metsuke) had to keep themselves informed of everything relating to the