THE CHRYSALIS
swords and bearing family crests. Within their own ranks were many class distinctions, each with its special privileges. The estates of high-class samurai were often wider and richer than those of the smaller daimios. Under the code of the samurai, however, all enjoyed that equality that belongs to comradeship in arms; and even as a king of England or France delighted in the title of first gentleman of the land, so the shogun considered himself first samurai of the empire.
But with the advent of the Tokugawa régime the existence of the daimio and the samurai, like that of the court aristocracy of Kioto, became an anachronism. The samurai, a product of the feudal period intervening between the fall of the imperial bureaucracy in the twelfth century and the
41
