INTERCOLONIAL COMMERCE. 30S will be obseiTed, had subsided between forty and fifty years, when the flame was rekindled by the artifices of the Dutch. But, for this circum- stance, it seems not improbable, that Christianity would, in Japan, as it. had done under the Ro- man Emperors, have risen superior to the perse- cutions it had undergone, and finally triumph- ed. It is impossible but the revolt of forty thou- sand of its subjects, instigated thereto by a foreign worship, should not, in a country long the victim of civil wars, have irritated and provoked a proud government to the utmost degree, and brought a political odium on all the followers of that worship.* The hostile spirit which actuated the government was evinced two years after the expulsion of the Portuguese, by the conduct pursued by the em- peror towards certain ambassadors sent to him by the Portuguese government of Macao. In viola- tion of the law of nations, which the Japanese had never before infringed in their intercourse with Europeans, he caused these ambassadors and
- " Many reasons," says Kempfer, " contributed to make
us suspected and hated at court, and occasioned, at last, the fatal change we underwent at this time ; but the profession ■we made of the Christian reli;:;ion was one of the chief, the whole court being exasperated against it to the highest de- gree as a public nuisance, and the only cause of the ruin and destruction of so many thousands of the emperor's subjects." JJisi. of Japan, Vol. I. p. 356.
