MIDDLE PERIOD
to push southward from Kamchatka. There was nothing like deliberate aggression on a large scale, but only a gradual movement with occasional incidents of violence and trespass. So insignificant indeed, were these evidences of foreign enterprise, that sixteen years passed before the officials in Yedo obtained intelligence of what was going on in the north, and they then persuaded themselves that rumour had greatly distorted the facts. But in truth this resurrection of the problem of foreign intercourse opened the last chapter of the history of Japanese feudalism.
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