THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR
banquet in his castle at Fushimi, to which the Emperor, the Empress, and the Prince of the Blood repaired, he presented a sum of 5,530 ryō to the sovereign, and gave five hundred koku of rice to the Empress, and three hundred to the Princes. Moreover, while strictly forbidding the general use of the chrysanthemum and paullownia badges, on the ground that they appertained solely to the sovereign, he not only used them himself, but gave surcoats on which they were blazoned as rewards to his followers. It seems, in short, to have been his purpose to show that while the Throne should be stable, it owed its stability to the support of great subjects like himself. Iyeyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, undoubtedly aimed at establishing his government on the will of the people. It may be true that, at times, the fortunes of his own house assumed larger dimensions on his political horizon than the interests of the nation: that would have been natural in the greatest statesman born amid such circumstances. But the words addressed by him to the nobles who surrounded his death-bed were unequivocal: "My son has now come of age. I feel no anxiety for the future of the State. But should my successor commit any grave fault in his administration, do you administer affairs yourselves. The country is not the country of one man, but the country of the nation. If my descendants lose their power because of their own misdeeds, I shall not
205
