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Rh far more dangerous Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, headed by the ex-loyalist leader Saigō Takamori, who had taken umbrage at the ultra-European leanings of his colleagues, and the Saitama insurrection of 1884. Radical discontent, too, had been kept in check by stringent regulations concerning the press and public meetings, and by the "Peace Preservation Act" which banished numerous agitators and suspects from the capital: and foreign relations with the neighbouring Asiatic states had been conducted with vigour, the Formosan pirates having been chastised by an armed Japanese force in 1874, and Luchu annexed by diplomatic means in 1879. During these years of breathless activity, Europeanisation was sometimes pushed into finical details. For instance, our dreary Philistine institution of exhibitions was swallowed at a gulp,—yards of tape, cakes of soap, etc., all complete, and brand-new orders of knighthood (1875) and aristocracy (1884) were created, sickly plants surely, which, in this age, may vegetate but cannot flourish. Such vagaries not unnaturally led many grave judges to shake their heads, especially abroad, where perhaps even to this day few thoroughly appreciate the fact that the Japanese of the old regime were no mere barbarians, but a community as highly cultured as it was intelligent,—a community moralised, humanised in the simple but wholesome school of the Chinese sages, knit together by the closest political and social bonds, and even to some slight extent penetrated by, or at least prepared for, European ideas by the Dutch influence emanating from Nagasaki, which was none the less real because it trickled underground.

But to return. The failure, in 1887, of long-protracted negotiations for treaty revision made of that year a turning-point in modern Japanese history. A strong reaction set in against foreigners and their ways, leading occasionally to murderous attacks on foreign residents and even to one on the present Czar of Russia, who happened, as Czarewitch, to be visiting Japan in 1891. Notwithstanding reaction, however, a long-promised Constitution, modelled to some extent on that of Prussia, was