MIDDLE PERIOD
practical application of his doctrines. It does not appear that, for a considerable time at any rate, his philosophy provoked any resentment. He enjoyed the full confidence of his feudal chief, and when he followed the latter to Yedo, every second year, the magnates of the Shōgun's Court took pleasure in listening to his dissertations. But the samurai ultimately roused official prejudice against him, and he had to retire from public life. His theories, however, had taken root. In Mito there arose a school of thinkers who adopted his doctrine as to the proper functions of Imperialism in the administration of State affairs, though they reversed his verdict against Buddhism, their conviction being that the unification of the nation could be best effected by the cooperation of the Buddhist and Shintō creeds.
Mito was the baronial capital of the province of Hitachi, which had been given in fief to a younger son of Iyeyasu. Owari and Kishu were assigned to his other sons, and these three families enjoyed the privilege of furnishing an heir to the Shōgun, should the latter be without direct issue. Mito, therefore, ought to have been a most unlikely place for the conception and propagation of principles subversive of the Shōgun's administrative autocracy. But what happened in Mito at the close of the seventeenth century was a natural result of the trend that Iyeyasu himself had given to public thought by wholesale encour-
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