To the memorial the Emperor replied that the proposal should be debated in Council, and in the course of a few weeks the scheme was definitely adopted which provided for the change from daimiates or Hans to provincial administrations, and the appointment of the former lords of those territories as Chiji or Governors. The entire revenues, it was arranged, should go to the imperial exchequer, and on the other hand the sovereign took it upon himself to provide for the samurai who had thereunto been the retainers of their feudal chiefs. The daimios were themselves invited to return to their territories for the last time and send in statements of their possessions, which they did, and ultimately, when their own incomes had been apportioned in accordance with a settled basis of commutation, they evacuated their old castles and went to dwell in retirement whithersoever their tastes led them. Some entered into trade, with a part or all of the capital obtained by commutation of their assigned incomes, but the majority, realising their total inaptitude for commercial pursuits, having been accustomed all their lives to leave such matters to their factors, were warned in time and refrained from embarking in enterprises for which they were obviously unfitted.
Meanwhile Kido Koin was called to the post of Minister of the Interior in the newly established Government. In 1871 he left Yokohama in company with Prince Iwakura, Ito Hirobumi, and others on the Embassy to Europe and America, elsewhere referred to, and returned to Japan with them in the autumn of 1873. Resuming his position at the Home Department, he continued to fulfil his arduous duties until increasing illness obliged him to withdraw, and he died of consumption in 1875, at the age of thirty-seven, regretted by the whole Japanese nation. His monument at the Aoyama Cemetery is all that visibly reminds this generation of one who was a patriot and a statesman of the highest ability, but Japan at large acknowledges its indebtedness to his unselfish devotion and keen perception of the requirements of the age in which he lived.
The rank of Marquis was posthumously conferred on Kido Koin, and the present holder of the title is a nephew of the great statesman.
XVIII
COUNT ITAGAKI
Though necessarily less active by reason of advancing age than he was a quarter of a century ago, when he succeeded in forcing the hand of the Government of the day to the extent that he extracted a promise of the establishment of a Diet in 1890, and though nominally he has retired from active political life, Count Itagaki Taisuke is still a power in the land of his birth, highly respected for his strict integrity of purpose, absolute sincerity, and wide philanthropy. As one of the leading spirits in the development of the project of Restored Imperial Rule he was particularly energetic in the years immediately preceding the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and displayed military ability of a high order in the War of the Restoration.
COUNT ITAGAKI
Born in the province of Tosa on the 17th of April 1837, of Samurai parents, he applied himself as a youth with much ardour to martial exercises, and was proficient in all the arts that the youth of the warrior caste was, in the palmy days of the Tokugawa Administration, expected to excel in. At Kochi, the chief town of Tosa, he devoted himself to military studies, and devoured such works on strategy as were then available, with the result that when the stupendous struggle of 1868 took place between North and South he was given the command of a division, in the army of the Imperialists, and displayed invincible talent in the leadership of his men throughout the campaign under Prince Arisugawa Taruhito and Marshal Saigo Takamori. The Tosa men were conspicuous for their steadiness, and were pronounced, in respect of drill and discipline, to be in the front rank of the forces that overcame the adherents of the Shogunate and made practicable the entire abolition of that long-cherished feudal system which so greatly retarded Japan’s progress.