MIDDLE PERIOD
by a woman,[1] Tsunayoshi might have showed greater political insight. But on the whole it seems juster to conclude that his love of learning overmastered all considerations of expediency, and made him at the close of the seventeenth century an unconscious contributor to influences which in the middle of the nineteenth were to work the downfall of his house.
But the Shintō revival was by no means as remarkable as a very pronounced development of political philosophy. At the head of the latter movement stood Hotta Masatoshi, by whose bold and timely action the succession to the Shogunate had been preserved in the Tokugawa family. Masatoshi was the first feudal statesman of Japan to enunciate the doctrine that the people are the basis of a nation, and to put it into practice by encouraging agriculture, protecting farmers against fiscal extortion, and endeavouring to propagate the tenets of a high morality among plebeians as well as samurai. Assassination, the common fate of too ardent reformers, terminated his noble career, but did not check the philosophic impulse he represented. It found a still more ardent and radical exponent in Kumazawa Banzan, chief factor of the Okayama fief. This memorable publicist's ethics were that every one in authority had a mission to fulfil, namely, to promote the prosperity and happiness of those over whom he
- ↑ See Appendix, note 25.
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