LATER PERIOD
and day. But there was evidence that the Mito men considered this edict in the light of a guarantee against concessions to foreigners, who, according to their creed, were the country's enemies, and that they thought the sovereign had confided it to their care because he doubted whether the Yedo Court could be trusted to promulgate it. Indeed, the question of promulgation caused much discussion in Yedo. The Tairō himself, unfalteringly consistent in his policy of restoring the Shōgun's administrative autocracy, maintained that the conveyance of such a document direct to a feudatory was a flagrant contravention of the powers vested in the Shōgun, and that the Yedo officials were competent to suppress the edict. Ultimately the Regent in Kyōtō, a faithful supporter of the Tairō, sought and obtained the sovereign's authority to revoke the document. But the Mito men refused to surrender it. They deemed that to temporise with foreigners was to imperil the national safety. They saw in commerce with the outer world nothing but an agent for causing the appreciation of commodities. They believed that, as one of the three great Tokugawa clans, an obligation devolved on them to save the Shogunate from its own blunders, and they professed to fear that if they surrendered the edict, the sovereign would ultimately be driven to seek the coöperation of some other clan. With regard to the possibility of driving out foreigners,
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