MIDDLE PERIOD
tion of commodities, but also that the vices which flourish wherever men congregate, threatened widespread demoralisation. Various empirical attempts to check the growth of the city proved altogether abortive. Samurai and farmers were forbidden to sell their lands to merchants, vetoes were imposed on the use of costly articles or the wearing of rich apparel, and philosophic doctrines were invoked to discredit the plutocratic tendency of the time. The chief effect of such efforts was to impair the prestige of the Shogunate by their obvious impotency. On the other hand, the heavy expenditures imposed on the feudal chiefs for the maintenance of their magnificent establishments in Yedo, where each of them had urban and suburban residences of palatial dimensions standing in beautiful parks, compelled them to have frequent recourse to the farmers for pecuniary assistance. But the farmers, between whom and the samurai the gulf had gradually grown less as long-continued peace deprived the latter of his uses and as poverty brought him into contempt, were no longer the submissive serfs of former times. Again and again they revolted against the oppressions of the feudatories, and on one occasion a vast concourse of rustics, aggregating two hundred thousand, were with difficulty restrained from marching upon Yedo to present a statement of their grievances to the Shōgun himself. It is true that the ringleaders
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