ABSTRACT
The commercial monopoly of the Dutch had gradually lost most of its former significance for the parties concerned, being now as much out of date as was the governmental system of the Shôguns of the Tokugawa house, a dynasty founded on terror. It only needed an energetic impulse from without to put an end to both and effect a thorough change in the state of things. The United States expedition under Commodore Perry, in 1854, brought this impulse. It was the yeast which set the educated class of the Japanese nation fermenting from one end to the other of their long string of islands—a fermentation which culminated in the downfall of the Shôgunate and the re-establishment of the Mikado’s power in 1868. How this restoration came to pass, and what struggles and rectifications the new rule had to experience before it could be considered to be the firm basis of a new era in commercial and social life, was narrated in detail in pp. 339–382 of vol. i. It only remains to recount briefly the development of foreign commerce that has taken place under this new system.
