Page:History of the Indian Archipelago Vol 3.djvu/319

 INTERCOLONIAL COMMERCE. 30S will be obseiTed, had subsided between forty and fifty years, when the flame was rekindled by the artifices of the Dutch. But, for this circum- stance, it seems not improbable, that Christianity would, in Japan, as it. had done under the Ro- man Emperors, have risen superior to the perse- cutions it had undergone, and finally triumph- ed. It is impossible but the revolt of forty thou- sand of its subjects, instigated thereto by a foreign worship, should not, in a country long the victim of civil wars, have irritated and provoked a proud government to the utmost degree, and brought a political odium on all the followers of that worship.* The hostile spirit which actuated the government was evinced two years after the expulsion of the Portuguese, by the conduct pursued by the em- peror towards certain ambassadors sent to him by the Portuguese government of Macao. In viola- tion of the law of nations, which the Japanese had never before infringed in their intercourse with Europeans, he caused these ambassadors and us suspected and hated at court, and occasioned, at last, the fatal change we underwent at this time ; but the profession ■we made of the Christian reli;:;ion was one of the chief, the whole court being exasperated against it to the highest de- gree as a public nuisance, and the only cause of the ruin and destruction of so many thousands of the emperor's subjects." JJisi. of Japan, Vol. I. p. 356.
 * " Many reasons," says Kempfer, " contributed to make