MIDDLE PERIOD
themselves to the people in the light of useless office-holders, who checked the advancement of men of talent, maintained towards the commoner an attitude of pretension based upon obsolete claims, preserved the continuity of their hereditary emoluments by the device of adoption, clamoured constantly for the creation of new sinecures, and losing, under the stress of poverty, their old independence of character, became suppliants for monetary assistance from men whom they still professed to despise, and even went so far as to sell their family names. On the other hand, the agricultural and commercial classes alike acquired new importance. In the case of the former the change was to some extent factitious. A legal veto existed against either the permanent sale of land or its division where the process resulted in an area of less than two and a half acres or a producing capacity of less than ten koku (fifty bushels, approximately). Thus, in order that an estate might be shared with a brother or apportioned among two sons, it must have a superficies of at least five acres, or a producing capacity of one hundred bushels. The result was that, in very many cases, second sons or younger brothers became labourers or tenants, and small land-holders disappearing, a class of "gentleman farmers" came into existence, who lived on their rents and were strangers to physical toil in any shape. Meanwhile the enormous sums disbursed every year in Yedo for the
141
