It was an agreeable surprise to us a month later, when there appeared at the legation two high officers of Satsuma, who undertook to pay the indemnity of £25,000 and gave an engagement to make diligent search for Richardson's murderers, who upon their arrest were to be punished with death in the presence of British officers, in accordance with the original demand. We may give Colonel Neale credit for knowing that there was no genuine intention on the part of Satsuma to carry out this promise, but on the other hand there was strong reason to suppose that Shimadzu Saburô himself had actually given the order to cut down the foreigners, and it could hardly be expected that the Satsuma men would ever consent to do punishment upon him. The actual doers of the deed were merely subordinate agents. We could not with justice have insisted on their lives being taken, and at the same time suffer the principal culprit to go scot-free. In order to succeed therefore in enforcing the whole of the demands made by Her Majesty's Government, it would have been necessary to invade Satsuma with an overwhelming force and exterminate the greater part of the clan before we could get at their chief; and we may be sure that he would never have fallen alive into our hands. We had bombarded and destroyed the greater part of the forts and town, probably killed a good many persons who were innocent of Richardson's murder, and had thereby elevated what was in the beginning a crime against public order into a _casus belli_. There would indeed, it seems to me, have been no justification after that for taking more lives by way of expiation. The Satsuma envoys, however, formally acknowledged that their countrymen had been in the wrong, and they paid the fine demanded by the British Government. No one therefore can blame the British Chargé d'Affaires for having made peace on these terms. It should be mentioned, however, that the Satsuma men borrowed the money from the Tycoon's treasury, and I have never heard that it was repaid.
SIR RUTHERFORD ALCOCK returned from Europe early in March 1864, and Colonel Neale took his departure. The members of the legation gave him a farewell dinner, at which he delivered himself of prognostications as to the future of those who had served under him. For me he prophesied a professorship of Japanese at an English University, but so far his words have not come true. The new chief was liked by everyone, and he was particularly gracious to myself, relieving me from all chancery work, so that I could devote the whole of my time to my Japanese studies. Willis and I occupied a wooden house in a back street between the native town and the foreign settlement, and there I worked industriously with my three teachers. Sir Rutherford had brought with him very ample powers, which he determined to make use of to chastise the Chôshiû clan for its hostile attitude. We had, it might be said, conquered the goodwill of Satsuma, and a similar process applied to the other principal head of the anti-foreign party might well be expected to produce an equally wholesome effect. In the summer of the previous year the Chôshiû people, acting upon the orders which they had extorted from the Mikado for the "expulsion of the barbarians," had fired upon an American merchant vessel, a Dutch corvette and a French despatch-boat as they passed through the straits of Shimonoséki. The corvette had returned the fire, and in the other two cases satisfaction of an incomplete kind had been obtained by the United States sloop "Wyoming" and the French squadron under Admiral Jaurès respectively. The batteries had been destroyed, but as soon as the foreign men-of-war quitted the scene, the Chôshiû men set to work to rebuild the forts, to construct others, and to mount all the guns they could bring together. So the hornet's nest was after no long interval in good repair again, and more formidable for attack and defence than before. That no foreign vessels could take their way through the straits of Shimonoséki, which they had been in the habit of passing from time to time after touching at Nagasaki in order to make a pleasant and easy passage to Yokohama, instead of encountering the stormy Cape Chichakoff, was felt to involve a diminution of western prestige. Nothing but the complete subjugation of this warlike clan, and the permanent destruction of its means of offence, would suffice to convince the Japanese nation that we were determined to enforce the treaties, and to carry on our trade without molestation from anybody, irrespective of internal dissensions.