al cases or to accept bribes from suitors
in civil ones; their staff, when visiting the capital, was strictly
limited, and the use of public-service horses* as well as the
consumption of State provisions was vetoed unless they were
travelling on public business. Finally, they were enjoined to
investigate carefully all claims to titles and all alleged rights of
land tenure. The next step was the most drastic and far-reaching of
all. Hereditary corporations were entirely abolished, alike those
established to commemorate the name of a sovereign or a prince and
those employed by the nobles to cultivate their estates. The estates
themselves were escheated. Thus, at one stroke, the lands and titles
of the hereditary aristocracy were annulled, just as was destined to
be the case in the Meiji era, twelve centuries later.

*Everyone having a right to use public-service horses was required to
carry a token of his right in the shape of a small bronze bell, or
group of bells, indicating by their shape and number how many horses
the bearer was entitled to.

This reform involved a radical change in the system and method of
taxation, but the consideration of that phase of the question is
deferred for a moment in order to explain the nature and the amount
of the new fiscal burdens. Two kinds of taxes were thenceforth
imposed, namely, ordinary taxes and commuted taxes. The ordinary
consisted of twenty sheaves of rice per cho* (equivalent to about
eight sheaves per acre), and the commuted tax--in lieu of forced
labour--was fixed at a piece of silk fabric forty feet in length by
two and a half feet in breadth per cho, being approximately a length
of sixteen feet per acre. The dimensions of the fabric were doubled
in the case of coarse silk, and quadrupled in the case of cloth woven
from hemp or from the fibre of the inner bark of the paper-mulberry.
A commuted tax was levied on houses also, namely, a twelve-foot
length of the above cloth per house. No currency existed in that age.
All payments were made in kind. There is, therefore, no method of
calculating accurately the monetary equivalent of a sheaf of rice.
But in the case of fabrics we have some guide. Thus, in addition to
the above imposts, every two townships--a township was a group of
fifty houses--had to contribute one horse of medium quality (or one
of superior quality per two hundred houses) for public service; and
since a horse was regarded as the equivalent of a total of tw