LATER PERIOD
unique idea was that the country had been betrayed. Nothing remained, therefore, except to issue a formal decree that the Yedo Court had definitely abandoned the traditional policy of isolation. A few months previously the same Court, by means of a similar instrument, had represented the Perry convention in the light of an irksome compromise, had spoken of the Americans as persons of "arbitrary and lawless manners," and had invited the nation to strenuously undertake naval and military preparations with the implied purpose of reverting to the time-honoured state of seclusion. Now a decree of diametrically opposite import was issued. It may well be supposed that such evidences of variability did not strengthen the nation's respect for the Shogunate. The conservatives openly declared that the Yedo Government had harboured pacific intentions from the first, and that it had simulated a warlike mien merely to placate popular indignation.
The Prince of Mito has been spoken of above as leader of the extreme conservatives. But a greater than the Prince of Mito stood at the head of the movement,—the Emperor himself. The Emperor, when the news of Perry's first coming reached Kyōtō, ordered that the succour of the gods should be supplicated, just as it had been supplicated at the time of the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century; and when he heard of Perry's second coming, he issued an edict direct-
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